Tech Giants Samsung, have announced today that they will be mass producing their 4Gb DDR3 DRAM with the industrys leading advanced  20 nanometer (nm) process. Samsung said that they had “pushed the envelope of DRAM scaling, while utilizing currently available immersion ArF lithography,” in order to produce its new chips.
There were some difficulties with Samsungs SRAM, with it only having solely a transistor unlike its big brother the DRAM having a capacitor and a transistor. But as always Samsung made it work by refining its design and manufacturing technologies resulting in a modified double patterning and atomic layer deposition technique which enabled the 20nm DDR3 production milestone to be achieved.
“Samsung’s new energy-efficient 20-nanometer DDR3 DRAM will rapidly expand its market base throughout the IT industry including the PC and mobile markets, quickly moving to mainstream status,” said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will continue to deliver next-generation DRAM and green memory solutions ahead of the competition, while contributing to the growth of the global IT market in close cooperation with our major customers.”
So what’s the benefits of having 20nm on the new 4Gb DDR3?, well for starts it will be more energy efficient and produce better cell performance Samsung say,“save up to 25 per cent of the energy consumed by equivalent modules fabricated using the previous 25 nanometer process technology”. Another positive for Samsung is that its manufacturing productivity is “over 30 percent higher than that of the preceding 25 nanometer DDR3, and more than twice that of 30nm-class DDR3”.