With scores of new smartphones and tablets being launched every year, several companies are on the prowl to leverage technologies which accelerate these mobile products’ performance. Samsung has announced its plans to introduce a 1GB mobile DRAM with a wide I/O interface for smartphones and tablet PCs.
The new wide I/O mobile DRAM uses 50nm-class process technology and supports data transfer speeds of up to 12.8GB/s. This results in reduction of power consumption by around 87%, while it increases the bandwidth of mobile DDR DRAM by around eightfold. This is calculated to be four times that of the LPDDR2 DRAM bandwidth. Samsung’s DRAM employs 512 pins for data input and output when pitted against the previous generation of mobile DRAMs which use a maximum of 32 pins.
“Following the development of 4GB LPDDR2 DRAM (low-power DDR2 dynamic random access memory) last year, our new mobile DRAM solution with a wide I/O interface represents a significant contribution to the advancement of high-performance mobile products,” commented Byungse So, senior vice president, memory product planning and application engineering at Samsung. “We will continue to aggressively expand our high-performance mobile memory product line to further propel the growth of the mobile industry.”
If all the pins required for regulating power supply and sending commands is taken into consideration, then this single DRAM design sports roughly 1,200 pins. Samsung had launched its first 50nm-class 1GB LPDDR2 DRAM in 2009 and followed that by introducing a 40nm-class 2GB LPDDR2 in 2010. Apart from disclosing plans to launch the wide I/O DRAM, the company is also aiming to release a 20nm-class 4GB wide I/O mobile DRAM sometime in the year 2013.
Samsung is currently presenting a paper related to wide I/O DRAM technology at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference 2011.