Smartphones, tablets and gaming gizmos are fuelling sales of DRAM for mobile devices, making that sector worth over $2 billion in the first quarter of this year.

That’s according to IHS, a US based market research company, which said that sales amounted to $2.07 billion – up 10 percent for the same quarter in 2010.

According to Ryan Chien, researcher for memory and storage at IHS, shipments and densities of mobile DRAM will continue to grow – as much as a factor of six between 2010 and 2015 for smartphones.

Densities will increase eightfold for handsets. But the position is even better for the manufacturers for the tablet market. Chien expects that DRAM densities for these devices will grow 14-fold in the same period.

The demand for mobile DRAM means new entrants into the vendor yard – Winbond and ProMOS are increasing production. But they will be hard pressed to topple Samsung, Hynix and Elpida – those three account for nearly 95 percent of mobile DRAM shipments. Samsung, Elpida and Hynix are followed by US company Micron, Winbond and ProMOS.

Revenues for mobile DRAM will be close to $7 billion for the calendar year 2011, while conventional DRAM expected to fall by 10 percent as companies are not in any hurry to increase densities in PCs.