Samsung Electronics said this week it had sold its 10 millionth (256Mb equivalent) DDR2 DRAM chip in July, 2004, which, the world’s largest memory firm claims, puts it into leading position in transition memory market to DDR2 standard.

“Samsung has been working on developing and expanding the DDR2 DRAM market for years. R&D began in 1998, and by May 2002 the company had completed the world’s first 512Mb DDR2 SDRAM. In October 2003, Samsung also became the first to ship mass produced DDR2s,” the company said in its statement.

Following the launch of chipsets supporting DDR2 technology in June, Samsung’s aggregate DDR2 sales broke 10 million units in July. The company believes that aggressive transition to new fabrication processes and experience in DRAM business have helped the company to maintain its DDR2 leadership. Still, the company’s market share in Q2 2004 was lower compared to last year’s figures, analysts estimate.

Dataquest, a market research firm, forecasts DDR2 SDRAM to represent 11% of the overall DRAM market in 2004, but predicts it will emerge as the market leader, with a share of around 50% percent next year. Samsung expects DDR2 SDRAM to reach 34% of its total DDR sales this year.

DDR2 memory products utilize FBGA memory chips for better stability, thermal efficiency, enhanced scalability and better overclockability. Additionally, DDR2 components themselves have some micro-architectural changes from the original DDR specs, such as, Off-Chip Driver calibration (OCD), On-Die Termination (ODT) as well as larger 4-bit prefetch, additive latency, and enhanced registers.