Samsung has reached an impressive milestone.
The electronics company has created and shipped 10nm-class DDR4 DRAM modules. These modules are extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology-based. Samsung has already shipped a million of these modules.
As the density on computer chips has increased, the photolithography process became a limitation because the tracings on the chip became so small that the wavelength of visible light was too large to make the features any smaller. The solution to this challenge was to use the shortest possible wavelength of light, which is extreme ultraviolet light. However, because EUV is absorbed by air and most optics, the EUV lithography process had to be moved into a vacuum chamber and instead of lenses, high resolution mirrors must be used.
The Samsung modules could be revolutionary for mobile and PC data center applications and enterprise servers. Samsung claims to be the first company to develop EUV in DRAMs and not be stopped by scaling. The benefit of these modules is that the computer chip (for an equivalent amount of memory) can be much smaller than with traditional processing. This is big news for semiconductor companies because it advances the move toward more DDR5/LPDDR5 in the memory space.
What this potentially means to the consumer is less memory issues on phones and computers, and a lot more memory available on small devices in general. It may take some time, however, for this to see widespread implementation, but it represents an exciting look into what is on the horizon for RAM.
GNB Corporation applauds Samsung on this accomplishment.
Since we are part of the KL family of companies, not only are we able to deliver high-quality vacuum components such as pristine, high-purity vacuum chambers; but we now have semiconductor wafer transfer valves. GNB/KL provides the best quality, delivery and price for vacuum hardware.
If you are interested in learning about the various vacuum components GNB Corporation offers to not only the semiconductor industry, but also industries such as solar, satellite testing, automotive, industrial, lyophilization, eyewear, medical solutions and more, check out our catalogs.