SK hynix develops world’s first 6th gen 10nm DRAM

Photo by MK DB

South Korean chipmaker SK hynix Inc. announced on Thursday that it has successfully developed the industry‘s first 16 gigabit (Gb) DDR5 DRAM using its 10-nanometer (nm) range 6th-generation 1c micro-processing technology.

“The degree of difficulty to advance the shrinking process of the 10nm-range DRAM technology has grown over generations, but SK hynix has become the first in the industry to overcome the technological limitations by raising the level of completion in design, thanks to its industry-leading technology of the 1b, the fifth generation of the 10nm process,” the company said.

SK hynix plans to complete preparations for mass production of the 1c DDR5 by the end of 2024 and to begin supplying the product in the following year.

The semiconductor industry has been labeling DRAM generations in the 10-nanometer class with alphabetical symbols, with 1x (1st generation), 1y (2nd generation), 1z (3rd generation), 1a (4th generation), and 1b (5th generation).

The 1c is the 6th-generation technology.

SK hynix started mass production of DRAM using 1a technology with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) in July 2021 and has been mass producing products with 1b technology since the second quarter of 2023.

The company developed the 1c DDR5 by expanding the platform of 1b DRAM, it said.

With this approach, the company was able to reduce potential trial and error during the process refinement and efficiently transfer the strengths of 1b technology to 1c.

The 1c DDR5, which will be mainly used in high-performance data centers, operates at a speed of 8 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is 11 percent faster than the previous generation. Its power efficiency has also improved by more than 9 percent.

As the era of artificial intelligence (AI) is in full swing and power consumption in data centers increases, SK hynix expects that global cloud service operators will be able to reduce power costs by up to 30 percent by applying its 1c DRAM chip in their data centers.

The company has also secured the product’s cost competitiveness.

It developed and applied new materials to its EUV-specific processes and optimized the overall EUV application processes. It has also increased the chip’s productivity by more than 30 percent compared to the previous 1b generation by carrying out innovations in design technology as well.

Looking ahead, SK hynix plans to apply the 1c technology to its 7th-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) products, such as HBM4E.

“We are committed to providing differentiated values to customers by applying the 1c technology equipped with the best performance and cost competitiveness to our major next-generation products including HBM1, LPDDR62, and GDDR73,” said Kim Jong-hwan, head of DRAM Development at SK hynix. “We will continue to work towards maintaining the leadership in the DRAM space and position as the most trusted AI memory solution provider.”