Samsung has officially announced the first memory chips complying with the DDR-II standard. These are 512Mbit chips put into 60-pin BGA package. They provide up to 533Mbit/sec data transfer rate, which can be increased up to 666Mbit/sec if necessary (for use in network equipment, for instance), according to Samsung.

Although the DDR-II specs haven’t been yet finalized, the major distinguishing features of the new standard have been already ratified by JEDEC in March 2002. So, Samsung, has every right to claim that its chips support off-chip output driver calibration (OCD) to maintain the required coefficient, on-die termination (ODT) making the output signal shape more optimal, and column-address strobe (CAS) increasing the bus efficiency.

Samsung is going to start mass production in Q3 2002, while the samples have been shipping for several weeks already.

IBM announced today that they created an interface chip for this type of memory modules.

Taking into account the fact that the industry is constantly requiring faster memory for new devices, together with the forced introduction of IBM’s and Samsung’s developments, we dare suppose that mass production of DDR-II won’t keep us waiting for long.