Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced it has begun mass production for the industry’s thinnest 12 nanometer (nm)-class, 12-gigabyte (GB) and 16GB LPDDR5X DRAM packages, solidifying its leadership in the low-power DRAM market.

Leveraging its extensive expertise in chip packaging, Samsung is able to deliver ultra-slim LPDDR5X DRAM packages that can create additional space within mobile devices, facilitating better airflow. This supports easier thermal control, a factor that is becoming increasingly critical especially for high-performance applications with advanced features such as on-device AI.

“Samsung’s LPDDR5X DRAM sets a new standard for high-performance on-device AI solutions, offering not only superior LPDDR performance but also advanced thermal management in an ultra-compact package,” said YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “We are committed to continuous innovation through close collaboration with our customers, delivering solutions that meet the future needs of the low-power DRAM market.”

With the new LPDDR5X DRAM packages, Samsung offers the industry’s thinnest 12 nm-class LPDDR DRAM in a 4-stack structure,¹ reducing the thickness by approximately 9% and improving heat resistance by about 21.2%, compared to the previous generation product.

By optimizing printed circuit board (PCB) and epoxy molding compound (EMC)² techniques, the new LPDDR DRAM package is as thin as a fingernail at 0.65 millimeters (mm), the thinnest among existing LPDDR DRAM of 12GB or above. Samsung’s optimized back-lapping³ process is also used to minimize the package height.

Samsung plans to continue expanding the low-power DRAM market by supplying its 0.65mm LPDDR5X DRAM to mobile processor makers as well as mobile device manufacturers. As demand for high-performance, high-density mobile memory solutions in smaller package sizes continues to grow, the company plans to develop 6-layer 24GB and 8-layer 32GB modules into the thinnest LPDDR DRAM packages for future devices.

¹ Structure with four layers packaged together, and each layer consists of two LPDDR DRAMs.
² Material that protects semiconductor circuits from various external environments such as heat, impacts, and moisture.
³ Grinding the backside of a wafer.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has developed the industry’s first LPDDR5X DRAM supporting the industry’s highest performance of up to 10.7 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).

Leveraging 12 nanometer (nm)-class process technology, Samsung has achieved the smallest chip size among existing LPDDRs, solidifying its technological leadership in the low-power DRAM market.

“As demand for low-power, high-performance memory increases, LPDDR DRAM is expected to expand its applications from mainly mobile to other areas that traditionally require higher performance and reliability such as PCs, accelerators, servers and automobiles,” said YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning of the Memory Business at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will continue to innovate and deliver optimized products for the upcoming on-device AI era through close collaboration with customers.”

With the surge in AI applications, on-device AI, which enables direct processing on devices, is becoming increasingly crucial, underscoring the need for low-power, high-performance LPDDR memory.

Samsung’s 10.7Gbps LPDDR5X not only improves performance by more than 25% and capacity by more than 30%, compared to the previous generation, but also expands the single package capacity of mobile DRAM up to 32-gigabytes (GB), making it an optimal solution for the on-device AI era that requires high-performance, high-capacity and low-power memory.

In particular, the LPDDR5X incorporates specialized power-saving technologies such as optimized power variation that adjusts power according to workload and expanded low-power mode intervals which extend energy-saving periods. These improvements enhance power efficiency by 25% over the previous generation, enabling mobile devices to provide longer battery life and allowing servers to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO) by lowering energy usage when processing data.

Mass production of the 10.7Gbps LPDDR5X is scheduled to begin by the second half of the year, following verification with mobile application processor (AP) and mobile device providers.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that its latest LPDDR5X DRAM with the industry’s fastest speed of 8.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) was validated for use on Snapdragon^® mobile platforms. By optimizing a high-speed signal environment between application processor and memory, Samsung has surpassed the previous maximum speed of 7.5Gbps achieved in March, reaffirming its leadership in the memory market.

As a global leader in the mobile DRAM market for more than a decade, Samsung has been driving mainstream adoption of high-end smartphones, enabling many more consumers to experience powerful computing performance on their mobile devices.

Thanks to its low-power and high-performance characteristics, LPDDR DRAM is quickly becoming pervasive in modern computing systems, expanding beyond smartphones and into PCs, high-performance computing (HPC), servers and automobiles, where it has enjoyed robust growth in the last few years.

Recently, LPDDR DRAM has seen especially high demand from the PC market, where its ability to combine high performance and low-power consumption in a small form factor is helping PC makers build smaller, lighter and more powerful laptops.

LPDDR memory is also an increasingly important component in modern vehicles. As more and more data is generated through autonomous driving features, high-bandwidth memory like LPDDR DRAM is needed to process massive amounts of vehicle data at much faster speeds.

For data centers and edge servers, LPDDR DRAM’s low-power characteristics can help reduce power consumption levels, resulting in an improved total cost of ownership (TCO) for data center managers, while cutting down on heat and carbon emissions to ultimately lower their impact on climate change.

As the need for faster, smaller and more power-efficient memory increases across various fields, LPDDR DRAM is expected to also extend its presence in emerging markets driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

“The joint validation of 8.5Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM has enabled us to accelerate market-wide availability of this high-speed memory interface by more than a year, which is a tremendous accomplishment made possible through our long-standing collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies,” said Daniel Lee, Executive Vice President of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. “As LPDDR memory continues to broaden its usage beyond smartphones into AI and data center applications, strong collaboration between memory and SoC vendors is becoming all the more important. Samsung will continue to actively engage with innovators like Qualcomm Technologies to enhance ecosystem readiness for future LPDDR standards.”

“At Qualcomm Technologies, we strive to be at the forefront of enabling and adopting the latest memory specifications on our Snapdragon mobile platforms. We’re the first in the mobile industry to enable the latest LPDDR5X at 8.5Gbps on Snapdragon mobile platforms, which will enhance user experiences with new features and improved performance for mobile, gaming, camera and AI applications,” said Ziad Asghar, Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

This year’s event, attended by more than 800 customers and partners, featured presentations from Samsung’s Memory and System LSI business leaders — including Jung-bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business; Yong-In Park, President and Head of System LSI Business; and Jaeheon Jeong, Executive Vice President and Head of Device Solutions (DS) Americas Office — on the company’s latest advancements and its vision for the future.

System LSI Business Highlights

In the morning session of this year’s Tech Day, the System LSI Business emphasized its goal of becoming a ‘total solution fabless’ through maximizing the synergy between its unique and wide-range product lineup. As Samsung Electronics’ fabless IC design house, the System LSI Business currently offers around 900 products, which include SoC (System on Chip), image sensor, modem, display driver IC (DDI), power management IC (PMIC) and security solutions.

The System LSI Business not only makes leading individual products, but is also a total solution provider that can merge the various logic technologies into one platform, in order to deliver optimized solutions to customers.

“In an age that requires machines to learn and think as people do, the importance of logic chips, which play the roles of the brain, heart, nervous system and eyes, is growing to unprecedented levels,” said Yong-In Park, President and Head of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will converge and combine its technology embedded in various products like SoC, sensor, DDI and modem, in order to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a total solution provider.”

▲ Yong-In Park, President and Head of System LSI Business, is giving his keynote speech at Samsung Tech Day 2022.

A Vision of Chips With Human-Like Performance

The Fourth Industrial Revolution was a key theme in System LSI’s Tech Day sessions. The System LSI Business’ logic chips are crucial physical foundations of Hyper-Intelligence, Hyper-Connectivity and Hyper-Data, which are the key areas of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Samsung Electronics aims to enhance the performance of these chips to a level at which they can carry out human tasks just as well as people can.

With this vision in mind, the System LSI Business is focusing on improving the performance of its essential IP like NPU (Neural Processing Unit) and modem, as well as innovating CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology by collaborating with global industry leading companies.

The System LSI Business is also continuing its work on ultra-high resolution image sensors so that its chips can capture images as the human eye does, and also has plans for sensors that can play the role of all five of the human senses.

Next-Generation Logic Chips Showcased

Samsung Electronics revealed a number of advanced logic chip technology for the first time at the Tech Day booth, including 5G Exynos Modem 5300, Exynos Auto V920 and QD OLED DDI, which are essential parts of various industries such as mobile, home appliance and automotive.

Chips that were newly released or announced this year including the premium mobile processor Exynos 2200 were also on display, along with the 200MP ISOCELL HP3 — the image sensor with the industry’s smallest 0.56-micrometer (μm)-pixels. Built on the most advanced 4-nanometer (nm) EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) process and combined with cutting-edge mobile, GPU and NPU technology, the Exynos 2200 provides the finest experience for smartphone users. The ISOCELL HP3, with a 12 percent smaller pixel size than the predecessor’s 0.64μm, can enable an approximately 20 percent reduction in camera module surface area, allowing smartphone manufacturers to keep their premium devices slim.

Samsung showcased its ISOCELL HP3 in action by showing the attendees of Tech Day the picture quality of photographs taken with a 200MP sensor camera, as well as demonstrating the workings of System LSI’s fingerprint security IC for biometric payment cards that combines a fingerprint sensor, Secure Element (SE) and Secure Processor, adding an extra layer of authentication and security in payment cards.

Memory Business Highlights

In a year marking 30 years and 20 years of leadership in DRAM and NAND flash memory respectively, Samsung unveiled its fifth-generation 10nm-class (1b) DRAM as well as eighth- and ninth-generation Vertical NAND (V-NAND), affirming the company’s commitment to continue providing the most powerful combination of memory technologies over the next decade.

Samsung also emphasized how the company will demonstrate greater resilience through collaborative partnerships in the face of new industry challenges.

“One trillion gigabytes is the total amount of memory Samsung has made since its beginning over 40 years ago. About half of that trillion was produced in the last three years alone, indicating just how fast digital transformation is progressing,” said Jung-bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business at Samsung Electronics. “As advances in memory bandwidth, capacity and power efficiency enable new platforms and these, in turn, stimulate more semiconductor innovations, we will increasingly push for a higher level of integration on the journey toward digital coevolution.”

▲ Jung-bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business, is giving his keynote speech at Samsung Tech Day 2022.

DRAM Solutions to Advance Data Intelligence

Samsung’s 1b DRAM is currently under development with plans for mass production in 2023. To overcome challenges in DRAM scaling beyond the 10nm range, the company has been developing disruptive solutions in patterning, materials and architecture, with technology like High-K material well underway.

The company then highlighted upcoming DRAM solutions such as 32Gb DDR5 DRAM, 8.5Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM and 36Gbps GDDR7 DRAM that will bring new capabilities to data center, HPC, mobile, gaming and automotive market segments.

Expanding beyond conventional DRAM, Samsung also underscored the importance of tailored DRAM solutions such as HBM-PIM, AXDIMM and CXL that can fuel system-level innovation in better handling the explosive growth of data worldwide.

1,000+ V-NAND Layers by 2030

Since its inception a decade ago, Samsung’s V-NAND technology has progressed through eight generations, bringing 10 times the layer count and 15 times the bit growth. Samsung’s most recent, 512Gb eighth-generation V-NAND features a bit density improvement of 42%, attaining the industry’s highest bit density among 512Gb triple-level cell (TLC) memory products to date. The world’s highest capacity 1Tb TLC V-NAND will be available to customers by the end of the year.

The company also noted that its ninth-generation V-NAND is under development and slated for mass production in 2024. By 2030, Samsung envisions stacking over 1,000 layers to better enable data-intensive technologies of the future.

As AI and big data applications drive the need for faster and higher-capacity memory, Samsung will continue to leapfrog bit density by accelerating the transition to quad-level cell (QLC), while further enhancing power efficiency in support of more sustainable customer operations worldwide.

More Far-Reaching Solutions Amidst Greater Collaboration

Samsung introduced an extensive portfolio of storage solutions spanning data center, enterprise server, mobile, client, consumer and automotive applications. The company highlighted its high-performance, low-power computational storage optimized for AI and how it can contribute to eco-conscious computing. Samsung also presented a new DRAM-less SSD, the PM9C1a, which supports both PCIe 4.0 and 5.0.

Samsung then shared aggressive plans to lead the industry in intelligent mobility solutions. The company discussed its wide-ranging memory offerings designed for every modern automotive function, from in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), autonomous driving (AD) and advanced driver assisted systems (ADAS), clusters and gateways to telematics. Since entering the automotive memory market in 2015, Samsung has been rapidly growing its market presence with the intent of becoming the largest automotive memory provider by 2025.

Reaffirming its overriding goals of enhancing customer value and pursuing a customer-oriented development philosophy, Samsung stressed its intent to further expand its ecosystem partnerships. To stimulate more widespread open innovation, Samsung revealed a key element of its blueprint for greater customer collaboration. The company will open a Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) where customers and partners can test and verify Samsung memory and software solutions in various server environments. Beginning with the opening of its first SMRC in Korea in the fourth quarter of this year, Samsung plans to later launch additional hubs in the U.S. and around the world, in collaboration with ecosystem partners like Red Hat and Google Cloud.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. has validated Samsung’s 14-nanometer (nm) based 16-gigabit (Gb) Low Power Double Data Rate 5X (LPDDR5X) DRAM for use on Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon^® mobile platforms.

Since developing the industry’s first 14nm-based LPDDR5X DRAM last November, Samsung has worked closely with Qualcomm Technologies to optimize its 7.5 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) LPDDR5X for use with Snapdragon mobile platforms. Delivering about 1.2 times faster speed than the 6.4Gbps LPDDR5 deployed in today’s premium smartphones, Samsung’s LPDDR5X is expected to boost the performance of ultra-high-resolution video recording as well as AI features such as voice recognition, image recognition and natural language processing in next-generation smartphones. Furthermore, by adopting advanced circuit designs as well as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), LPDDR5X power consumption can be reduced by approximately 20%.

“The successful validation of our LPDDR5X solution for Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon mobile platforms is a testament to our leadership in DRAM technology,” said Jinman Han, Corporate Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Global Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “We expect applications for this high-performance, low-power memory to extend beyond smartphones into the data center, PC and automotive, enabling more devices and systems to run with greater efficiency.”

“Qualcomm Technologies is an industry leader in enabling and adopting the latest LPDDR DRAM specifications. Enablement of LPDDR5X on Snapdragon platforms will enhance user experiences with new features and improved performance for gaming, camera and applications using our latest AI Engine across various Qualcomm Technologies’ product lines,” said Ziad Asghar, Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

To better accommodate the increasing demand for premium DRAM solutions, Samsung will continually pursue the development of low-power DRAM products that deliver greater performance and even higher capacities in support of a growing array of next-generation systems.

“In recent years, hyperconnected market segments such as AI, augmented reality (AR) and the metaverse, which rely on extremely fast large-scale data processing, have been rapidly expanding,” said SangJoon Hwang, Senior Vice President and Head of the DRAM Design Team at Samsung Electronics. “Our LPDDR5X will broaden the use of high-performance, low-power memory beyond smartphones and bring new capabilities to AI-based edge applications like servers and even automobiles.”

Samsung’s LPDDR5X is a next-generation mobile DRAM designed to significantly boost speed, capacity and power savings for future 5G applications. In 2018, Samsung delivered the industry’s first 8Gb LPDDR5 DRAM and today, the company is aggressively moving beyond mobile markets with the first 16Gb LPDDR5X DRAM.

The LPDDR5X DRAM will offer data processing speeds of up to 8.5 gigabits per second (Gbps), which are over 1.3 times faster than LPDDR5’s 6.4Gbps. Leveraging the industry’s most advanced 14nm DRAM process technology, it will also use around 20% less power than LPDDR5 memory. In addition, the 16Gb LPDDR5X chip will enable up to 64 gigabytes (GB) per memory package, accommodating increasing demand for higher-capacity mobile DRAM worldwide.

Later this year, Samsung will begin collaborating with global chipset manufacturers to establish a more viable framework for the expanding world of digital reality, with its LPDDR5X serving as a key part of that foundation.

The company will look to broaden its pacesetting mobile DRAM lineup with continuous improvements in performance and power efficiency, while also reinforcing its market leadership with greater manufacturing agility.