According to Digitimes, memory chip manufacturers and associated controller vendors have stepped up their efforts to promote products to the automotive market to seize new business opportunities. Micron, Nanya, Winbond, Phison and Silicon Motion are entering the automotive market, where chip demand is expected to grow extraordinarily over the next few years.

The automotive industry accounts for less than 3% of total memory consumption today, but demand from this sector will grow steadily thanks to the emergence of smart and connected cars, the sources say.

Micron recently unveiled its new LPDDR5 memory chips for cars – they are part of a new portfolio of memory and storage products designed to provide functional safety in cars based on the international ISO 26262 standard.

Requirements for the levels of reliability in the nodes of automotive electronics (Micron)

Micron previously said it expects fully autonomous passenger cars to arrive by 2025. According to the American manufacturer, such cars will require about 74 GB of RAM and a 1 TB solid-state drive.

Both Winbond and Nanya offer dedicated DRAM chips for the automotive industry. Winbond also provides flash memory for cars. According to sources, Winbond and Nanya are already generating more than 10% of their chip revenues for the automotive sector.

Phison, which specializes in supplying controllers for flash-based devices, has high hopes for automotive systems to grow its business further. The company is confident that new autopilot technologies and plug-in cars will drive overall memory consumption in the automotive sector by 2025, with an average growth rate of the car storage market of 15,6% per year.

Silicon Motion is optimistic about sales in the automotive sector this year. The company provides automotive-grade storage solutions including SSD, eMMC and UFS controllers, as well as FerriSSD, Ferri-eMMC and Ferri-UFS SoC solutions for infotainment and autopilot systems.

According to Gartner estimates, the automotive memory market will grow to $ 6,3 billion in 2024 against $ 2,4 billion in 2020.