Samsung Begins Mass Producing Industry-First 10nm Class DRAM

Samsung has pushed memory technology further once again with the announcement that they have begun mass producing 10nm class, 8-gigabit DDR4 DRAM chips.These new 10nm DDR4 DRAM chips support transfer rate of up to 3,200 megabits per second, 30 percent faster than 20nm DDR4 DRAM. The move to 10nm also means that power draw will be 10 to 20 percent less compared to 20nm.

“Samsung’s 10nm-class DRAM will enable the highest level of investment efficiency in IT systems, thereby becoming a new growth engine for the global memory industry,” said Young-Hyun Jun, President of Memory Business, Samsung Electronics. “In the near future, we will also launch next-generation, 10nm-class mobile DRAM products with high densities to help mobile manufacturers develop even more innovative products that add to the convenience of mobile device users.”

The industry-first 10nm-class DRAM is the result of Samsung’s advanced memory design and manufacturing technology integration. To achieve an extremely high level of DRAM scalability, Samsung has taken its technological innovation one step further than what was used for 20nm DRAM. Key technology developments include improvements in proprietary cell design technology, QPT (quadruple patterning technology) lithography, and ultra-thin dielectric layer deposition.

Unlike NAND flash memory, in which a single cell consists of only a transistor, each DRAM cell requires a capacitor and a transistor that are linked together, usually with the capacitor being placed on top of the area where the transistor rests. In the case of the new 10nm-class DRAM, another level of difficulty is added because Samsung had to stack very narrow cylinder-shaped capacitors that store large electric charges, on top of a few dozen nanometer-wide transistors, creating more than eight billion cells. Samsung’s leading-edge 10nm-class 8Gb DDR4 DRAM significantly improves the wafer productivity of 20nm 8Gb DDR4 DRAM by more than 30 percent.

Samsung was also first to roll-out 20nm 4-gigabit DDR3 DRAM chips back in 2014. While introducing a wide array of 10nm-class DDR4 modules with capacities ranging from 4GB for notebook PCs to 128GB for enterprise servers, Samsung will be extending its 20nm DRAM line-up with its new 10nm-class DRAM portfolio throughout the year.

source (press release): https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-starts-mass-producing-industrys-first-10-nanometer-class-dram