Samsung Electronics, the biggest company in the DRAM market, announced the beginning of volume production of 1Gb DDR SDRAM components. These chips are produced utilising 0.10um process technology from 300mm wafers for maximum cost efficiency. New chips were produced on Samsung’s first 300mm mass production line which begun trial production in the second half of 2001 with the production of 512Mb DDR components.

1Gb components from Samsung are available in PC2100 (DDR266) and PC2700 (DDR333) speeds and support bank configurations of x4/8/16 in a single design making possible to produce 4GB registered memory modules, the highest available on the market today. Additionally, Samsung announced availability of unbuffered 2GB memory modules using 1Gb components for desktop and notebooks applications (pretty powerful notebooks, aren’t they?).

Samsung believes that the market for 1Gb components will grow rapidly and cites Gartner Dataquest, which says that 1Gb DDR DRAM market will form in the second half of 2003 with $900 million in sales and will grow to $2 billion in 2004 and $12.1 billion by 2007. Unfortunately, Samsung does not indicate whether it plans to use 0.1 micron process technology and 300mm wafers for production of 512Mb components.