SK Hynix makes industry’s highest density 24Gb DDR5 DRAM chip

South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc. said on Wednesday it has shipped samples of 24 Gigabit (Gb) double data rate 5 (DDR5) DRAM, the industry’s highest density for a single chip.

The company said its latest DRAM chip was produced with the cutting-edge 1a nanometer technology that utilizes extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment.

Currently, DDR DRAM offerings mostly come in density of 8Gb or 16Gb, with the latter the highest density for a single DRAM chip.

SK Hynix expects the new product will also ease the market's DRAM supply glut by moving faster to the next-generation chips.

It said the new chip increases data speed by up to 33% while slashing power consumption by 25%.

The 24Gb DDR5 chip comes in just 14 months after SK Hynix became the industry’s first chipmaker to release a DDR5 DRAM in October 2020.

The initial offerings of the chip will come in 48 Gigabyte (GB) and 96GB modules for supply to cloud data centers.

The product is also expected to power high-performance servers for big data processing such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as well as realizing metaverse applications among others, it said.

COLLABORATION WITH INTEL

“With the release of 24Gb DDR5, we are closely working with a number of customers that provide cloud services,” said Kevin (Jongwon) Noh, president and chief marketing officer at SK Hynix.

The 1a nanometer technology has also allowed the company to improve its production efficiency, resulting in higher wafer yields.

The 1a refers to the fourth generation of the 10-nm DRAM products, according to the semiconductor industry’s latest classification, following the first three generations of 1x, 1y and 1z.

The key advantage of the 1a technology is that it grants a 25% increase in the number of chips produced using the same-sized wafer, compared with the third generation based on the 1z nanometer node.

SK Hynix said it has already worked with Intel Corp. to test the 24Gb DDR5 chip for the US firm’s central processing unit (CPU).

“Intel and SK Hynix have a long history of strong collaboration,” said Carolyn Duran, vice president of memory and IO technologies in Intel’s Data Center and AI Group.

“Today’s announcement is another illustration of our two companies working together to deliver a 24Gb solution to address the needs of our mutual customers.”

Write to Shin-Young Park at nyusos@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.