Mobile Memory Systems

Abstract

The mobile market will continue to drive the memory industry in the up-coming years, with the highest growth for both system memory and storage. It is expected that handsets and tablets will represent more than 40% of DRAM and NANDindustry bit demand in 2018. The evolution from feature phones to smartphones and tablets imposed a steady improvement to memory system in terms of interfaces, performances and features, to address the challenging requirements of new applications.After a brief description of smartphone architecture, this paper summarizes features and characteristics of the memory devices in today's mobile systems describing their evolution in the recent years. Furthermore, it illustrates usage models and typical workloads measured in smartphones. Some relevant use cases where the memory system plays a fundamental role for the user experience are described, including high resolution photo and video, and gaming.