Widening Technology Gap
Samsung Electronics announced on December 20 that it began to mass-produce 10-nanometer class (1y-nm), 8-gigabit (Gb) DDR4 DRAM last month. The mass production of the second-generation DRAM is regarded as another quantum leap of Samsung Electronics following the company’s mass production of 1x-nm DRAM initiated in February last year.
According to the company, the productivity of the second-generation DRAM can be improved by approximately 30% even without any EUV exposure system. In other words, the number of chips produced from the same single wafer can be increased by about 30%. In addition, the capacity, speed and power efficiency of the second-generation 1y-nm DRAM are 200% of those of the same company’s 2y-nm 4Gb DDR3 developed in 2012.
“Our new product adopts circuit design for speed maximization, power consumption minimization and size minimization along with super-sensitive cell data sensing system design and second-generation air gap,” Samsung Electronics explained, adding, “Compared to the first-generation product, the speed and power consumption have been improved by more than 10% and 15%, respectively.” It went on to say, “We are expecting that the innovative technology will set the stage for our mass production of next-generation premium DRAM such as DDR5 for servers, LPDDR5 for mobile use, HBM3 for supercomputers and GDDR6 for high-speed graphic.”
According to industry insiders, Samsung Electronics is currently two years ahead of the other companies in the same industry given that it began to manufacture first-generation 1y-nm DRAM early last year and the others recently began to do so. “We are going to keep widening the gap by increasing the production of the newly developed item,” said Jin Kyo-young, Samsung Electronics president in charge of its memory business unit.