Micron Technology, a major maker of dynamic random access memory, said Monday that it had begun to sample the world’s first 1Gb DDR3 chips with its partners. The company also announced that it would begin to make DDR3 memory chips starting from “early next-year”, which is a fairly aggressive plan.

“We are excited to introduce the world’s first 1Gb DDR3 components. Micron’s strength in advanced DRAM technology has given us the industry leading position in high density memory solutions,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron’s memory group.

Evaluation samples of Micron’s 1Gb DDR3 components are available to select customers with production expected to begin early next year. Micron’s 1Gb DDR3 components will be available in various output configurations (x4, x8 and x16), and will be fully compliant to the most recent JEDEC DDR3. These components will support module densities from 512MB through 4GB and a variety of module types including FB-DIMMs, UDIMMs, SODIMMs, and RDIMMs.

DDR3 memory is designed to increase performance and lower power consumption of DDR2 memory utilized today. The new memory standard features relatively low operating voltage of 1.5V, 8-bit pre-fetch architecture (compared to 4-bit pre-fetch buffer with DDR2), on-die termination (ODT), power-saving modes known as PASR (partial array self refresh) and ASR (auto self refresh) and some other capabilities. The memory will be able to operate at up to 1600MHz, but in the exchange for enhanced latencies of CAS (column address strobe) 5 to 10 (compared to CAS 3-6 on DDR2).

A 2Gb DDR3 device is also expected to be available from Micron early next year, helping to enable even higher density applications.