Samsung Announces First 8Gb LPDDR5 DRAM for 5G

Samsung announced that it has successfully developed the industry’s first 10-nanometer, 8-gigabit LPDDR5 DRAM. Since bringing the first 8Gb LPDDR4 to mass production in 2014, Samsung has been setting the stage to transition to the LPDDR5 standard for use in upcoming 5G and AI-powered mobile applications.

The 8Gb LPDDR5 boasts a data rate of up to 6,400 Mb/s, which is 1.5 times as fast as the mobile DRAM chips used in current flagship mobile devices. With the increased transfer rate, the new LPDDR5 can send 51.2 GB of data, approximately 14 full-HD video files, in a second.

This performance advancement has been made possible through several architectural enhancements. By doubling the number of memory “banks“, subdivisions within a DRAM cell, from eight to 16, the new memory can attain a much higher speed while reducing power consumption. The 8Gb LPDDR5 also makes use of a highly advanced, speed-optimized circuit architecture that verifies and ensures the chip’s ultra-high-speed performance.

To maximize power savings, the 10nm-class LPDDR5 has been engineered to lower its voltage in accordance with the operating speed of the corresponding application processor, when in active mode. It also has been configured to avoid overwriting cells with ‘0’ values. In addition, the new chip will offer a ‘deep sleep mode’, which cuts the power usage to approximately half the ‘idle mode’ of the current DRAM. LPDDR5 will be able to power AI and machine learning applications.