A boom in shipments of smart wearable devices is yielding major opportunities for suppliers of memory, including NAND flash and low-power DRAM. The global market for smart wearable devices will more than double in 2015, rising to 45.7 million units in 2015, up from 19.6 million in 2014, according to the market research firm International Data Corp. (IDC). In 2019, shipments are expected to expand to 126.1 million units, a more than six-fold rise over 2014.
Much of the growth will be propelled by smart wearable devices—products that can run applications supplied by third-party vendors. The market is expected to be led by smart watches, such as the Apple Watch. It is anticipated that the smart wrist-wear segment will expand to 101.4 million units in 2019, up from 40.7 million in 2015 and 17.7 million in 2014.
Figure 1: Global shipments of wearables will more than double in 2015 and rise by six-fold in 2019. (Source: IDC)
This massive expansion in wearables comes in stark contrast to the tepid growth or declines in expected shipments for other major memory applications, including PCs, media tablets and smart phones. Because of this, wearables represent an attractive opportunity for memory suppliers. However, memory densities in wearables sometimes are lower than in tablets and smartphones, resulting in less revenue per unit for memory makers.
For example, a recent teardown analysis of the Apple Watch conducted by IHS Inc. determined that the wearable device incorporates 8 GB of multilevel-cell (MLC) NAND flash memory from Toshiba Corp. and 512 MB of low-power double-data-rate (LPDDR) DRAM from Micron Technology, Inc.
This represents one-half of the memory density in the current iPhone model; the entry-level model of the iPhone 6 contains 16 GB of NAND and 1 GB of LPDDR DRAM. The Apple Watch’s memory usage also is less than the low-end iPad Air 2, which employs 2 GB of LPDDR DRAM, along with 16 GB of NAND.
Wearable devices like the Apple Watch often are designed as subsidiary devices that only work in combination with mobile phones or other wireless devices. Because they rely on a host device for connectivity or processing power, these wearables don’t typically need as much memory. However, it’s not always the case that memory usage is lower in wearables than in smartphones and tablets. For example, Google Glass integrates 1 Gb of mobile DDR 2 SDRAM and 16 Gb of Embedded Multimedia Card (eMMC) MLC NAND-flash memory, according to another IHS teardown. These represent the same densities as those used in the iPhone 6.
While IHS described the version of Google Glass it dissected as a prototype, this technology could serve as an example of memory usage in future eyewear products. IDC predicts 4.5 million global shipments of smart eyewear in 2019, up from 1 million in 2015. Other segments of the wearables market identified by IDC include modular wearables, defined as devices that can be worn anywhere on a person’s body using clips or straps. Shipments of modular wearables are set to expand to 6.7 million units in 2019, up from 2.6 million in 2015.
IDC also forecasted smart clothing wearables, which add computing capabilities to garments such as shirts, socks, hats and other products. Shipments of such devices are predicted to rise to 5.6 million in 2019, up from about 200,000 in 2015. With these products in their infancy, it’s not yet clear what their memory requirements will be. However, even with lower or uncertain memory demand per unit, the fast expansion of the wearable device market represents a major growth opportunity for suppliers of NAND DRAM and other types of memory.