Green Semiconductors
The semiconductor industry is turning green. As the number of electronics parts is increasing due to the Internet of Things (IoT), a reduction in the power consumption of electronic devices is expected to be the key to securing market competitiveness.
According to industry sources on May 27, semiconductor companies at home and abroad, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, are actively seeking to sharpen their competitiveness in so-called “green semiconductors,” starting with low-power memory chips and sensors, owing to the increased amount of data in the IoT era.
Samsung’s green DRAM is DDR4, which has reduced operating voltage and doubled bandwidth compared to DDR3. Thus, it is in the limelight as a next-gen memory chip. Previously, Samsung described DDR4 as a product with as much as 40 percent increased performance and up to 15 percent reduced energy consumption compared with DDR3. The Korean tech giant is planning to develop magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) and Phase-change Memory (PRAM) as next-gen green memory solutions. MRAM is both CPU and memory, and PRAM demands less energy due to being slow but non-volatile.
SK Hynix also developed a 64GB DDR4 module in March to target the green memory market. This product has twice as much capacity as the conventional one using Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology. It needs 1.2V to operate, lower than 1.35V for DDR3, which allows reduced power consumption. The world’s second-largest memory chip manufacturer is accelerating efforts to develop low-power and high-efficiency memory chips through nano-processing.
Censors are consuming less power, too. US-based Rambus is intensifying efforts to develop a lensless smart sensor in line with the IoT era. The sensor reorganizes data using a phase grating technique instead of the existing optical method. It is possible to make a smaller lensless smart sensor that demands less energy and is much cheaper to maintain. Rambus is aiming at the commercialization of the sensor in one to two years.
This kind of move is being expanded to various areas such as power control systems. As for memory, there is growing demand for cost reduction from companies that run Internet data centers because of data increases. In the mobile sector, the necessity of low-power semiconductors is emerging to increase the operational life of those semiconductors.