Samsung’s new DRAM chips just went into mass production for use in “next-gen flagship” smartphones. Samsung Electronics, the subsidiary that manufactures chipsets for Samsung announced that the new memory chips are based on an industry-first 2nd-gen 10-nanometer class (1y-nm) process. The 16 Gb LPDDR4X DRAM, Samsung claims, will improve the efficiency of smartphones and control the battery drain.
Moreover, the DRAM chip achieves the current speed of 4,266Mbps that is a standard in today’s flagship phones, but with a decrease in power intake by up to 10 percent, as compared to the DRAM memory chips used presently.
“The advent of 10nm-class mobile DRAM will enable significantly enhanced solutions for next-generation, flagship mobile devices that should first hit t he market late this year or the first part of 2019,” Sewon Chun, Senior Vice President of Memory Sales and Marketing at Samsung Electronics said in a statement.
Samsung’s initiative to manufacture high capacity, low power memory chips began with the first 10nm-class 8Gb DDR4 server DRAM last November. The 16Gb LPDDR4X DRAM goes into product just eight months after. The company is expected to expand production of the 1y-nm process-based DRAM chips by more than 70 percent.
Furthermore, Samsung announced that it has created an 8GB LPDDR4X mobile DRAM chip by combining four of 10nm-class 16Gb LPDDR4X DRAM, as 16Gb converts to 2GB. It’s a four-channel package that can deliver a data rate of 34.1GB per second. The chip’s dimensions have been shrunk by more than 20 percent as compared to the 1st-generation package. That should allow phone manufacturers to make even more slimmer devices.
The LPDDR4X DRAM chips will be made in 4GB, 6GB and 8GB packages in a bid to capture more market share. The chips are being manufactured in a new DRAM production line in Pyeongtaek, Korea that the company claims will assure a stable supply of all mobile DRAM chips.