SAN FRANCISCO—Although DRAM content in smartphones is on the rise, DRAM's share of the average smartphone's bill of materials (BoM) has fallen by about half over the course of the past year due to declining DRAM prices, according to market research firm IHS iSuppli.
Teardowns conducted by IHS's teardown service revealed that DRAM's share of the average smartphone BoM declined to 6.3 percent in the first quarter, down from 13.4 percent in the same period of last year, IHS (El Sequndo, Calif.) said. DRAM's share of the average smartphone BoM totaled $11.81, down from $19.48 in the first quarter of 2011, IHS said.
DRAM's percentage of the average smartphone BoM has been in the single digits since the second quarter of 2011, when it slipped to 8.5 percent, according to IHS. The firm said it tore down 19 separate smartphones in the analysis and only included those that featured discrete DRAM in order to maintain consistency in comparison.
DRAM content rose from an average of 256 megabytes in the first quarter of 2010 to 800 megabytes during the first quarter this year, according to IHS.
Dee Nguyen, memory analyst at IHS, said in a statement that larger demands are being placed on the processing power of smartphones, making DRAm an increasingly important component. "The growing importance of DRAM, however, appears not to be correspondingly reflected in the total BOM cost of a smartphone given the memory’s declining share," Nguyen said.
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