Micron, the US-based memory chip maker, said on Tuesday it has begun shipping samples of its most advanced DRAM chips based on LPDDR5X, the 5X low-power double data rate, the standard for smartphone manufacturers for testing. The latest DRAM chips are manufactured using Micron’s most advanced manufacturing technology, called 1-beta. The company ships its LPDDR5X DRAM chip manufactured with 1-alpha technology in current quantities and says the new 1-beta chip has 15% better power efficiency than the old version as well as an improvement of 35 % on the number of bits stored per area.
DRAM chip is a memory chip that loses memory on power off, while NAND memory chip that does not depend on the power supply.
1-beta manufacturing technology further shrinks 1-alpha technology, although Micron don’t say how much. Chipmaking has evolved to fit more and more transistors on a fixed area of silicon, which over the decades has reduced cost per memory and power consumption – albeit with some limitations. are starting to appear.
Micron says it can access 1-beta manufacturing technology without using the extremely expensive lithography tools or EUV, which are used in the latest processor chips in high-end smartphones.
Thy Tran, vice president of DRAM process integration at Micron, said the new DRAM will be manufactured first at Micron’s plant in Hiroshima, Japan, and then at other large-scale manufacturing sites, including whole Taiwan.
© Thomson Reuters 2022
