Samsung Electronics announced that it has developed what it is claiming is the industry’s first 8G-bit, low power double data rate 4 (LPDDR4), mobile dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip.
The chip is designed for mobile devices and will improve mobile memory applications, enabling users to have faster, more responsive applications, more advanced features and higher resolution displays while maximizing battery life.
With the new chip, Samsung will focus on the premium mobile market including large screen UHD smartphones, tablets and ultra-slim notebooks that offer four times the resolution of full-HD imaging, and also on high-performance network systems.
The 8G-bit LPDDR4 is fabricated on 20-nanometer (nm) class process technology, and offers 1GB on a single die, which is currently the largest density available for DRAM components.
Overall, the new LPDDR4 interface will provide 50 percent higher performance than the fastest LPDDR3 or DDR3 memory. Also, it consumes approximately 40 percent less energy at 1.1 volts.
“This next-generation LPDDR4 DRAM will contribute significantly to faster growth of the global mobile DRAM market, which will soon comprise the largest share of the entire DRAM market,” Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president of memory sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement. “We will continue introducing the most advanced mobile DRAM one step ahead of the rest of the industry so that global OEMs can launch innovative mobile devices with exceptional user convenience in the timeliest manner.”
In addition, Samsung’s new 8G-bit LPDDR4 uses a Low Voltage Swing Terminated Logic (LVSTL) I/O interface, which was originally proposed by Samsung to JEDEC and has become a standard specification for LPDDR4 DRAM.
Based on this new interface, the LPDDR4 chip will enable a data transfer rate per pin of 3,200M bps, which is twice that of the 20nm-class LPDDR3 DRAM now in mass production, the company said.
The incessant requests for data coming from billions of mobile devices around the world will demand that data be centralized and available at all times, according to an October report from IT research firm IDC.
Worldwide installed raw storage capacity (byte density) will climb from 2,596 exabytes (EB) in 2012 to a staggering 7,235EB in 2017. An exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes of storage–the 64-bit microprocessors found in many computers can address 16EBs of memory.
Through this study, IDC also leveraged the type of device the storage is integrated into, such as enterprise solutions, PCs, mobile devices and other categories, to see which areas will experience continued future growth.