From DailyTech: Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KRX:005930) (KRX:005935) continues to drive the state of the art in the DRAM (memory) market. The company just announced that it was starting mass production of LPDDR4, an industry first.
LPDDR4 is expected to soon be surplanted by the "hybrid memory cube" (HMC) -- a joint effort by Samsung and the other top players in the memory industry to develop a stacked DRAM package (aka vertical-DRAM (v-DRAM)) using through silicon via (TSV) technology. But for the next year or two, LPDDR4 is expected to be the state of the art, delivering cost savings, higher densities, and greater power savings.
Samsung is not alone in the LPDDR4 game, although it is the first to hit mass production. Both Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology, Inc. (MU) and SK Hynix Inc. (KRX:000660) started sampling DDR4 and LPDDR4 packages earlier this year.
To consumers the most visible sign of this new technology will be an increase in the number of high end smartphones with 4 GB of DRAM or more.
Samsung's first mass production LPDDR4 chips are built on a 20 nm process and are 8-Gigabits (1 GB). Initially Samsung will offer a 2 GB package, using a pair of 8-Gb. Typically smartphone memory is today stacked under the system-on-a-chip (SoC) in a single package solution, although the memory is printed on separate dies. - See more at: http://www.dailytech.com/Samsung+Preps+4+GB+LPDDR4+RAM+to+Power+4K+Smar…
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