Samsung Uses New Facility for 20nm DDR3 DRAM Manufacture

Whenever a semiconductor company passes to a new manufacturing process, it makes sure to come out and loudly declare it, as happened now with Samsung, whose newest factory went into business.

Crossing to a new chip-making process technology always brings benefits in terms of potential memory density, performance, power consumption, etc.

As such, Samsung does have a reason to boast about having reached the 20nm node, especially since this is “the world’s first mass production of 20nm-class 2 Gigabit (Gb) DDR3 DRAM.”

It should be tangibly more powerful than 30nm memory and also able to operate on 40% less energy, plus bring a 50% productivity boost.

The company hopes to start making 4 GB chips by the end of the ongoing year as well (2011), leading to memory modules of 8 GB, 16 GB and even 32 GB next year.

"The global semiconductor industry is in a period of fierce cyclical volatility, so the opening of this new memory fab and the start of mass production of the world's first 20nm-class DRAM are important milestones to reinforce Samsung's industry leadership," said Samsung Electronics Chairman Kun-hee Lee, receiving the first wafer from the new memory line.

Manufacture started at Line-16, the newest fab that Samsung put to work.

"We must prepare for an intensifying storm in the semiconductor industry by further enhancing our technological capabilities and expertise in order to maintain our leadership position.”

Samsung expects its green memory to start showing up more and more as part of various IT applications, like desktop PCs and notebooks, enterprise server systems and everything in between.

Of course, the company will have to deal with the continued pressure that the DRAM segment as a whole is still feeling, even about a year after oversupply started to seriously drive prices into the ground.

While the new DRAM has every chance of being adopted, it also means that existing inventories of 30nm and other chips will get one more reason to refuse to digest, dragging the market lower and lower, or, at best, preventing it from recovering.