Samsung Electronics, announced today that it has begun mass production of the world’s smallest DRAM chip. 

The company said the industry’s first 2nd-generation of 10-nanometer class (1y-nm), 8-gigabit (Gb) DDR4 DRAM chip is aimed to be used in a wide range of next-generation computing systems, Samsung said in a statement. The new 8Gb DDR4 features the highest performance and energy efficiency for an 8Gb DRAM chip, as well as the smallest dimensions.

Samsung’s DDR4 features an approximate 30 percent productivity gain over the company’s 1st–generation 10nm-class 8Gb DDR4. Further, thanks to the use of an advanced, proprietary circuit design technology, the new 8Gb DDR4’s performance levels and energy efficiency have been improved by about 10 and 15 percent respectively. The new 8Gb DDR4 can operate at 3,600 megabits per second (Mbps) per pin, compared to 3,200 Mbps of the company’s 1x-nm 8Gb DDR4.

To enable these achievements, Samsung claims it has applied new technologies, without the use of an EUV process. In the cells of the DRAM chip for instance, a newly devised data sensing system enables a more accurate determination of the data stored in each cell, which leads to a significant increase in the level of circuit integration and manufacturing productivity. 

Meanwhile, the South Korean tech giant confirmed that it is now accelerating its plans for much faster introductions of next-generation DRAM chips and systems, including DDR5, HBM3, LPDDR5 and GDDR6, for use in enterprise servers, mobile devices, supercomputers, HPC systems and high-speed graphics cards.

While noting that it would shift most of its existing DRAM production capacity to 10-nano chips in 2018, the global leader in electronics indicated that it has finished validating the DRAM chip with CPU manufacturers, and now plans to work closely with its global industry partners in the development of more efficient next-generation computing systems.