Market research firm Gartner forecasts that global semiconductor chip revenue would reach an upward of US$14.1billion in 2017, a 7.2% jump from a year ago. Of total,  memory chip sales will make up for 71%, or US$10 billion.

Driving the growth trajectory of the memory chip market will be data-sucking applications. For example, in-vehicle advanced driver assistance system or ADAS technology process and store  pixel-heavy vision data on memory chip for buffering.

The sophistication of smart phones will drive demand, too. As smart phones are increasing adopting high-resolution display and CMOS image sensor cameras, users are consuming more of data storage spaces. As a result, the memory density per system for smart phones doubles to 4GB.

At the back-end of the boom cycle spectrum are cloud computing platform network and data centers servers, which are craving for more of data storage spaces to accommodate explosion in the data traffic.

All combined, they will likely jerk up ASPs, or average selling prices for memory chips.

Another good sign is that inventory build-up starts getting loose. True enough, the global memory chip makers began the year 2016 at a slow start, weighed down by too much inventory, and started to recover in the second-half, due to solid demand from smartphones and data center servers, easing down inventory levels.