Serial flash will be a fast growing segment for NOR flash, with the market size forecast to grow at a CAGR of 14-15% by 2015, according to Robert France, vice president of strategic and product marketing at Spansion. Growth will be mainly driven by consumer and communications applications, said France.
Web-Feet Research has given a more optimistic outlook, estimating the market for serial flash memory to grow at a CAGR of about 19% through 2015.
Customer demand for serial interfaces is transitioning from low density and low cost solutions to higher density offerings with more advanced performance, France indicated. Spansion's new FL-S product family meets these needs, enabling customers to design next-generation products that require 3D graphics and a certain degree of performance and security, France said.
The Spansion FL-S NOR flash chips are built using 65nm process technology. The company claimed the new series has over 20% faster DDR read speeds and three times the programming speed over competing serial flash solutions.
Spansion plans to roll out its FL-S products in 128Mb and 256Mb in October, followed by a 512Mb version in the fourth quarter and 1Gb in the second quarter of 2012, according to France. Specific applications that can benefit from the FL-S series include car-use instrument clusters and infotainment systems, digital TVs, set-top boxes and printers, and smart meter applications.
In additional news, France disclosed that consumer and gaming remains the biggest revenue contributor, accounting for about 41% of Spansion's total revenues followed by the automotive and industrial sector with 22%, wireless with 19%, and computing and communications with 12%.
Spansion manufactures its 65nm, 90nm and 0.11-micron products at its factory site in Austin, Texas, and also outsources production to China-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). Spansion in 2010 remained the world's largest NOR flash supplier with a 36% market share, followed by Micron Technology with 18%, Macronix International with 17% and Winbond Electronics with 17%.