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Samsung: on DRAM Development

by Anna Filatova
07/31/2002 | 02:09 AM

At the Recently held Platform Conference 2002 in the Silicon Valley Samsung Electronics, the largest memory maker demonstrated some pretty interesting slides telling the public about the semiconductor products and its specifications, as well as about the upcoming company’s plans concerning the production of different DRAM types.

At present the major products of the company are 128Mbit and 256Mbit DRAM chips manufactured as PC1600/PC2100/PC2700 (DDR200/266/333) chips and different modules based on them. Among the latter we could mention the standard 512MB modules, small SODIMM modules for portable PCs up to 512MB big, and special Registered DIMMs up to 1GB big for server needs.<%BANNER[article]%>

Samsung also manufactures 512MB PC1600/PC2100 (DDR200/266) chips, though the maximum module size here reaches 2GB for the Registered DIMM and 1GB for the regular DIMM. SODIMMs based on these chips are still restricted to 512MB capacity.

As for the DDR400 memory, which mass adoption was reported last week in our news, all our concerns about the latency and stability got absolutely justified. Unfortunately, it turned out that new modules built of the DDR400 chip will require higher voltage equal to 2.6V, instead of the standard 2.5V. As a result, there are two conclusions we can draw:

The mainboard fit for use with DDR400 should support this higher voltage of the memory subsystem, which might also require a special BIOS version.
High voltage may lead to higher heat dissipation of the memory modules, which will definitely tell on the overall thermal situation inside the case and lead to the system instability.

At present, the company manages to reach the acceptable level of chip yields only in case of 3-4-4 timings, which is very slow, I should say, because almost all the existing PC2700 (DDR333) memory modules can work at 2.5-2-2 timings. In other words, the performance of DDR400 will be just a little bit higher than that of the current standard, or will be just the same as that of the high-quality PC2700 modules.

In the presentation they also mentioned DDR-II standard. They claimed that the development of the 512Mbit chips supporting it were in progress. The first samples of these chips should be available in Q1 2003, as to Samsung.

Since Intel is going to cherish its currently not very beloved i850E chipset up to H2 2003, Samsung is also planning to produce PC1066 RDRAM modules with 128MB-512MB capacity. The mass production of these modules started this quarter with 16bit and 32bit RIMM modules being produced. The manufacturers of communications equipment are also taken into account: they will be getting special SORIMMs meeting the PC1066 specs. The interesting thins is that the company is also considering the possibility of creating PC1200/1333/1600 RDRAM chips, even though this memory type is dying out little by little.

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