DRAMeXchange says iPad intro will moderate NAND Flash market

By Steve Leibson, Technology Evangelist, Denali Software

The recent, very successful launch of Apple’s iPad introduces both a new gadget and an entirely new product category to the consumer and business markets. Apple announced last Monday that it had sold more than 300,000 iPads on April 3, the first day that the iPad was available in the US. (That includes pre-orders, of course.) Note that this number tops the first-day sales of Apple’s iPhone. Analyst predictions are all over the map, projecting that Apple will sell somewhere between 4 and 7.1 million iPads in 2010 as the company starts to sell the product around the world. Each Apple iPad contains 16, 32, or 64 Gbytes of MLC NAND Flash depending on selected options. No wonder, therefore, that DRAMeXchange is predicting that the introduction of the iPad and copycat products from other vendors will have a stabilizing effect on NAND Flash pricing for the foreseeable future. There’s a built-in, assured demand for high-capacity NAND Flash chips in the middle term.

Last month, DRAMeXchange noted that mainstream MLC NAND Flash pricing had declined by a few percentage points over 1Q 2010 and that the market seemed to stabilize during the first half of March. Looking forward, DRAMeXchange expects MLC NAND Flash pricing to stabilize due to the demand by this new product category. In fact, iSuppli’s iPad sales estimate for next year is for nearly 15 million units sold and the company’s estimate for 2012 just crosses the 20 million/year threshold. Those numbers plus competing products in the new category suggest a rapidly growing and large market for high-capacity MLC NAND Flash devices.

Sources for the MLC NAND Flash used in Apple’s iPad have appeared in photos of the iPad teardowns conducted by the US FCC in February and by iFixit.com last weekend. The earlier FCC teardown concealed the vendor markings on the chips with gray rectangles but subsequent image processing of the FCC photos by Anandtech and iFixit.com using a little help from Photoshop revealed Toshiba NAND Flash ICs in the pre-production FCC teardown unit. The iFixit.com teardown on an as-sold, production iPad shows two of Samsung's K9LCG08U1M 64Gbit MLC NAND Flash memory chips soldered to the iPad’s processor board alongside the proprietary, Apple-designed A4 processor chip . iSuppli’s estimates in February placed a cost of between $29.50 and $118 on the 16 to 64 Gbytes of NAND Flash built into each iPad.