Since the barrier to entry is very high, there's not so much pressure to compete further on price.
DRAM chips are integrated circuts that consist of individual transistors and capacitors for each bit, plus the wiring and logic to read, refresh, and write to those bits. They're substantially transistors.
It's true that logic, power, analog, flash, DRAM, SRAM, and mixed signal ICs do have some significant differences, and some manufacturers optimize for a subset of those capabilities, but they're similar enough that if one industry advances leaps and bounds (like Flash storage and low-power processing have).
So why does DRAM lag behind the others?
No, even minimum feature size is improving much slower than in the past. Fabs are focusing on specifics that are still giving gain: lower power transistors, SRAM. Really high performance transistors like for amps have not gotten much smaller, DRAM has not gotten much smaller, analog has not gotten much smaller.
The capacitors and sense amplifiers in DRAM have not gotten smaller nearly as fast as any of the other features.
> DRAM chips are integrated circuts that consist of individual transistors and capacitors for each bit, plus the wiring and logic to read, refresh, and write to those bits.
I know what a DRAM is...
