Samsung starts DRAM producing at 60nm

Samsung announced that it has begun mass producing the industry's first 1Gigabit DDR2 DRAM using 60 nanometer class process technology.

Use of the new process technology is a significant milestone in that it increases production efficiency by 40 percent over the 80nm process technology deployed in DRAM fabrication since early 2006, and offers twice the productivity of 90nm general process technology.

Ample market availability of 1Gb DRAM will further increase the demand for large density DRAMs, especially as the new premium Vista operating system imposes a DRAM requirement of at least 1Gigabyte (GB). Samsung's extensive line up of 60nm 1Gb DRAM-based modules includes 512MB, 1GB and 2GB densities supporting either 667Mbps or 800Mbps speeds with customer validation.

Samsung anticipates such a high degree of receptivity to the 60nm process that it should drive greater demand for 1Gb DRAM chips in the near future over today's mainstream density of 512Mb. In addition to its 60nm process technology innovation, Samsung's use of metal-insulator metal (MIM) for its capacitors provides enhanced data storage in sub-70nm designs.

Furthermore, the use of a recently-announced selective epitaxial growth (SEG) technology provides for a broader electron channel, and optimizes the speed of each chip's electrons to reduce power consumption and enable higher performance.

The 60nm process is expected to become the mainstream circuit technology for DRAM in 2008. In the first year of market availability alone, 60nm DRAM revenues are expected to reach US $2.3billion worldwide and further increase to US $32 billion by 2009.