This article describes the characteristics of the IC.
NAND flash sales are expected to fall 32% and will remain the third largest IC market this year.
IC Insights recently released the latest mid-year McClean report for 2019. The report includes IC Insights' ranking of the 33 largest IC product categories based on 2019 expected sales and unit shipments. Among them, 33 IC product categories are regulated by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization, and the five IC product categories are shown in Figure 1.
Although sales are expected to fall 38% this year, the DRAM market will again be the largest in the IC product category in 2019, with sales reaching $62 billion, down from $99.4 billion in 2018. IC Insights believes that the DRAM market will account for 17% of the total IC market in 2019. In contrast, DRAM accounted for 23.6% of the total IC market in 2018.
Figure 1 Five major IC product categories.
The NAND flash market is expected to decline from second to third in this year's ranking, with total sales falling 32% to $40.6 billion. Overall, the DRAM and NAND flash categories are expected to account for 29% of the total IC market of $357.7 billion this year, compared to 38% in 2018.
In the past decade, DRAM has typically accounted for 14-16% of total IC sales, and NAND flash has accounted for 11-12%. However, due to tight storage supply, the average selling price climbed, which led to a sharp increase in sales in both categories in 2017 and 2018. In 2018, DRAM has surpassed MPU sales for the first time since the 1990s.
IC Insights This type of MPU will slow down by about 2.5% in 2019, mainly due to the global economic slowdown, the uncertainty caused by the US-China trade war and market chaos, and the impact of excess data center server inventory after high growth in 2018.
IC Insights also expects to replace NAND flash in 2019 as the second-largest mainstream microprocessor for traditional PCs, servers, mainframes and a wide