14 DAY TRIAL // It is no secret that the semiconductor market has been quite quickly moving on to better manufacturing processes, and Elpida again confirms this by announcing its most advanced DRAM chips yet.
The past months have been literally packed full of news regarding solid state drives built out of 25nm NAND Flash chips.
Among others, Corsair moved its units from 34nm to 25nm, while Intel and Micron prepared new products of their own.
Now, Elpida has issued a press release in which it reveals that it has finished developing 25nm DRAM with a density of 2 Gb (Gigabits).
Some might see this as surprising, considering that it wasn't too long ago that the same company unleashed 4 Gb DDR2 mobile RAM.
Regardless, the outfit has prepared a much faster sort of chip now, of the DDR3 variety, with a frequency of 1,866 MHz when working at 1.5V.
One asset of the new RAM is that it can also work at low voltage (1.35V), although the frequency will be restricted to 1,600 MHz, which is still quite high, all things considered.
Also, compared to 30nm chips, the cell area per bit required is 30% smaller, while power consumption is 15% lower (20% less during standby).
The 2 Gb RAM will begin shipping in samples and being mass produced during the month of July, 2011, after which Elpida should also get around to developing and releasing 4 Gb DDR3 SDRAM.
This will have 44% increase in chip output per wafer and will allow the company to make new Mobile RAM products.
Seeing as how the overall chip output will be increased over what is now possible, one can deduce that prices will drop as well.
All that remains is to see how many companies adopt thew new solution once the third quarter finally comes around.