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.

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.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled the industry’s first memory module supporting the new Compute Express Link (CXL) interconnect standard. Integrated with Samsung’s Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) technology, this CXL-based module will enable server systems to significantly scale memory capacity and bandwidth, accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in data centers.

The rise of AI and big data has been fueling the trend toward heterogeneous computing, where multiple processors work in parallel to process massive volumes of data. CXL—an open, industry-supported interconnect based on the PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 interface—enables high-speed, low latency communication between the host processor and devices such as accelerators, memory buffers and smart I/O devices, while expanding memory capacity and bandwidth well beyond what is possible today. Samsung has been collaborating with several data center, server and chipset manufacturers to develop next-generation interface technology since the CXL consortium was formed in 2019.

“This is the industry’s first DRAM-based memory solution that runs on the CXL interface, which will play a critical role in serving data-intensive applications including AI and machine learning in data centers as well as cloud environments,” said Cheolmin Park, vice president of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will continue to raise the bar with memory interface innovation and capacity scaling to help our customers, and the industry at-large, better manage the demands of larger, more complex, real-time workloads that are key to AI and the data centers of tomorrow.”

Dr. Debendra Das Sharma, Intel Fellow and Director of I/O Technology and Standards at Intel said, “Data center architecture is rapidly evolving to support the growing demand and workloads for AI and ML, and CXL memory is expected to expand the use of memory to a new level. We continue to work with industry companies such as Samsung to develop a robust memory ecosystem around CXL.”

Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, AMD, added, “AMD is committed to driving the next generation of performance in cloud and enterprise computing. Memory research is a critical piece to unlocking this performance, and we are excited to work with Samsung to deliver advanced interconnect technology to our data center customers.”

Unlike conventional DDR-based memory, which has limited memory channels, Samsung’s CXL-enabled DDR5 module can scale memory capacity to the terabyte level, while dramatically reducing system latency caused by memory caching.

In addition to CXL hardware innovation, Samsung has incorporated several controller and software technologies like memory mapping, interface converting and error management, which will allow CPUs or GPUs to recognize the CXL-based memory and utilize it as the main memory.

Samsung’s new module has been successfully validated on next-generation server platforms from Intel, signaling the beginning of an era for high-bandwidth, low latency CXL-based memory using the latest DDR5 standard. Samsung is also working with data center and cloud providers around the world to better accommodate the need for greater memory capacity that will be essential in handling big data applications including in-memory database systems.

As the DDR5-based CXL memory module becomes commercialized, Samsung intends to lead the industry in meeting the demand for next-generation high-performance computing technologies that rely on expanded memory capacity and bandwidth.

“Samsung is the only semiconductor company with logic and memory capabilities and the expertise to incorporate HKMG cutting-edge logic technology into memory product development,” said Young-Soo Sohn, Vice President of the DRAM Memory Planning/Enabling Group at Samsung Electronics. “By bringing this type of process innovation to DRAM manufacturing, we are able to offer our customers high-performance, yet energy-efficient memory solutions to power the computers needed for medical research, financial markets, autonomous driving, smart cities and beyond.”

“As the amount of data to be moved, stored and processed increases exponentially, the transition to DDR5 comes at a critical inflection point for cloud datacenters, networks and edge deployments,” said Carolyn Duran, Vice President and GM of Memory and IO Technology at Intel. “Intel’s engineering teams closely partner with memory leaders like Samsung to deliver fast, power-efficient DDR5 memory that is performance-optimized and compatible with our upcoming Intel Xeon Scalable processors, code-named Sapphire Rapids.”

Samsung’s DDR5 will utilize highly advanced HKMG technology that has been traditionally used in logic semiconductors. With continued scaling down of DRAM structures, the insulation layer has thinned, leading to a higher leakage current. By replacing the insulator with HKMG material, Samsung’s DDR5 will be able to reduce the leakage and reach new heights in performance. This new memory will also use approximately 13% less power, making it especially suitable for datacenters where energy efficiency is becoming increasingly critical.

The HKMG process was adopted in Samsung’s GDDR6 memory in 2018 for the first time in the industry. By expanding its use in DDR5, Samsung is further solidifying its leadership in next-generation DRAM technology.

Leveraging through-silicon via (TSV) technology, Samsung’s DDR5 stacks eight layers of 16Gb DRAM chips to offer the largest capacity of 512GB. TSV was first utilized in DRAM in 2014 when Samsung introduced server modules with capacities up to 256GB.

Samsung is currently sampling different variations of its DDR5 memory product family to customers for verification and, ultimately, certification with their leading-edge products to accelerate AI/ML, exascale computing, analytics, networking, and other data-intensive workloads.