According to Samsung, they’ve made a major breakthrough as it clears a large barrier in creating more advanced phone RAM. The Korean firm has started manufacturing on a 16-gigabit LPDDR5 mobile RAM chipset that is being called the first ever memory chip made by using extreme ultraviolet lithography.
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This technology uses lasers and light-sensitive chemicals to create the required silicon. Samsung has the industry lead in this technology already, but it has cleared a “major developmental hurdle” in scaling RAM, which will make the technology and industry ripe for growth.
There are also some immediate real-world benefits that we could see in our devices within the next 12 months. The 6.4Gbps of bandwidth is about 16 percent faster than the 12-gigabit chips seen before, while a 16GB package of chips is about 30 percent thinner. This means the technology could help produce phones that are just as slim as today’s but has more space for other components like bigger batteries, more powerful processors or better cameras.
Samsung is angling this advancement as a perfect solution to push flagship devices even further (hopefully without pushing up the price too much). Some believe this kind of advancement could help us get phones closer to level of performance of some laptops and truly make our phones a do-all device.
EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography uses an EUV light of the extremely short wavelength of 13.5 nm. It allows exposure of fine circuit patterns with a half-pitch below 20 nm that cannot be exposed by the conventional optical lithography using an ArF excimer laser. Putting it into practical use requires a variety of element technologies, including the light source, optics, masks, photoresist, and lithography tools.
As always, the world of technology moves forward and hopefully we can see the fruits of this work in our hands sooner rather than later.
