Samsung starts mass production of 10nm-class DDR4

Samsung has announced that it will begin mass production of eight gigabit DDR4 dram chips on a 10nm class process. This means that these are chips with a transistor size between ten and nineteen nanometers.

According to Samsung, the new memory supports a maximum data rate of 3200 megabits per second. This makes it about thirty percent faster than the 2400Mbit/s that is achieved with ddr4 chips that are made with the 20nm class. In addition, thanks to the smaller process, the chips are ten to twenty percent more efficient than the previous generation of DDR4 memory and the company gets more than thirty percent more chips from a wafer.

Samsung makes the 10nm-class cells by leveraging improvements in proprietary design techniques, including quadruple pattern lithography, or qpt, and in producing high-purity non-conductive layers no more than a few ,ngströms thick, or thinner than a nanometer.

The Korean company expects to be able to prepare a 10nm-class-ddr4-dram version this year that is intended for smartphones and other mobile devices. The products coming this year within the 10nm class line will range from 4GB laptop RAM to 128GB bars for servers. The 20nm-class line that started in 2013 is also being expanded.