Samsung announces '10nm-class' LPDDR5

Samsung has announced further development of its DDR5-based product family, adding an 8Gb Low-Power DDR5 (LPDDR5) chip to the 16Gb DDR5 chip it announced back in February.

Due to take over from DDR4 and offering, as with each successive generation of the Double Data Rate (DDR) memory standard, improved performance, Samsung's new LPDDR5 product is aimed to low-power yet high-performance devices including smartphones, tablets, and embedded systems of the type you might find in self-driving vehicles.

'This development of 8Gb LPDDR5 represents a major step forward for low-power mobile memory solutions,' claims Jinman Han, senior vice president of memory product planning and application engineering at Samsung Electronics. 'We will continue to expand our next-generation 10nm-class DRAM lineup as we accelerate the move toward greater use of premium memory across the global landscape.'

Produced, as Han says, on a '10nm-class' process node, a clever bit of marketing which hides an actual size 'between 10 and 20 nanometres,' the DRAM will be launched in two bandwidths: 6,400Mb/s running at 1.1V and 5,500Mb/s running at 1.05V. The company also claims multiple tweaks to the design which reduce overall power draw, including the ability to lower its voltage as the system CPU reduces its clock speed, a mode which avoids overwriting cells with a zero value, and a 'deep sleep' mode with half the power draw of Samsung's current LPDDR4X's equivalent 'idle mode' - all of which combine to reduce power draw by up to 30 percent, the company says.

Samsung has not yet announced when it will bring its LPDDR5 chip to volume production, nor its 16Gb full-power DDR5 equivalent.