Mobile Memory Systems

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.