RMG and Associates

Insightful, timely, and accurate

Semiconductor Technology Consulting

Semiconductor & Patent Expert Consulting

Ron@Maltiel-consulting.com

(408) 446-3040

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Samsung New 1Gb DRAM

Has a wide interface designed for smartphones and tablets, and allows transfer speeds of 12.8GB/s. This increases the bandwidth of mobile DDR DRAM eightfold, and uses 87 per cent less power

1. Samsung takes DRAM 512-pins wide/ EETimes

2. How to Get 5 Gbps Out of a Samsung Graphics DRAM / SSTs Wafer news

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1. Samsung takes DRAM 512-pins wide

Peter Clarke, 2/21/2011 7:24 AM EST


LONDON – Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has announced the development of a 1-Gbit DRAM with a 512-pin wide I/O interface intended for mobile applications such as smartphones and tablet computers.

The chip is implemented in a manufacturing process technology somewhere between 50- and 59-nm and Samsung is also due to present a paper related to wide I/O DRAM technology at the 2011 International Solid-State Circuits Conference being held from February 20 to 24 in San Francisco.

To boost data transmission, the wide-I/O DRAM uses 512 pins for data input and output compared to the previous generation of mobile DRAMs, which used a maximum of 32 pins. Including pins for commands and power supply and its regulation the WIO DRAM is designed to have ip to 1,200 pins.

Samsung did not indicate whether it intends to offer the 1-Gbit WIO DRAM as a packaged part or to use it as a bare die in multi-chip packages. Nor did Samsung state when engineering samples of the 1-Gbit WIO DRAM would be available or it would be in volume production.

Nonetheless, as a result of the extreme I/O the 1-Gbit WIO DRAM can transmit data at 12.8-Gbytes per second, increasing the bandwidth of mobile DDR DRAM eightfold, while reducing power consumption by approximately 87 percent. The bandwidth is also four times that of LPDDR2 DRAM, which is approximately 3.2-Gigabytes per second, Samsung said.

To follow on from the WIO DRAM launch Samsung is planning for a 20-nm class 4-Gbit WIO mobile DRAM to become available in 2013,

"Following the development of 4-Gbit LPDDR2 DRAM last year, our new mobile DRAM solution with a wide I/O interface represents a significant contribution to the advancement of high-performance mobile products," said Byungse So, senior vice president, memory product planning and application engineering at Samsung Electronics, in a statement.

Top

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2. How to Get 5 Gbps Out of a Samsung Graphics DRAM

Dick James, Posted on 2/17/2011

It’s well known that electronics games buffs like their image creation as realistic (or at least as cinema-like) as possible, which in image-processing terms means handling more and more fine-grained pixel data as fast as possible. That means more and more stream processors and texture units in the graphics processor to handle parallel data streams, and faster and faster memory to funnel the data in and out of the GPU.

We recently pulled apart a Sapphire Radeon HD5750 graphics board, containing an AMD/ATI RV840 40-nm GPU, running at 700 MHz, and supported by eight Gb (1 GB) of Samsung GDDR5 memory. This card is a budget card, but the ATI chip still boasts 1.04 billion transistors, 720 stream processors and 36 texture units, can compute at ~1 TFLOPS with a pixel fill rate of 11 Gpixel/s, and can run memory at 1150 MHz with 74 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. I’m not a gamer, but those numbers are impressive to me!

When we started looking at the memory chips, and decoded the part number, we found that we had Samsung’s fastest graphics memory part, claimed to run at 5 Gbps. Graphics DRAMs are designed to run faster anyway, but 5 Gbps is three times faster than the fastest regular DDR3 (Double-Data Rate, 3rd Generation) SDRAM, which can do 1.6 Gbps.*

So what makes this one so blazing fast? Beginning with the x-ray, the difference between a Graphics DDR5 when compared with a 1Gb DDR3 (K4B1G0846F-HCF8) part starts to show up. If we look at an x-ray of the DDR3 chip, we can see that it has the conventional wire-bonding down the central spine:

Plan-View X-ray of Samsung 1 Gb DDR3 SDRAM
When we compare the K4G10325FE-HC04 GDDR5 we can see first that it’s a flip-chip device (no wires), and if we squint hard enough we can also see that the bumps are distributed across the die as well as along the spine.

Plan-view X-ray of Samsung 1 Gb GDDR5 Part from ATI Radeon

This is confirmed in the die photograph:

Die Photo of Samsung 1 Gb GDDR5 SGRAM
Which compares with the die photo of the 1-Gb DDR3:

Die Photo of Samsung 1 Gb DDR3 SDRAM
The die layout is clearly optimized to reduce RC delays from the memory blocks to the outside world. The next question for me is the nature of the flip-chip bonding; is it regular solder bumps or gold stud bumps? A cross-section solves that problem – solder, on plated-up copper lands.

Cross-sectional Images of Samsung GDDR5 Chip in Package
A quick x-ray spectroscopy analysis tells us that the solder is silver-tin lead-free, confirming the package marking.

So the answer to our question is actually fairly obvious – lay out the die to reduce input/output line lengths, and thereby RC delays on the chip, and replace bond wires with bumps to minimize RC delays in the package. A nice exposition of basic principles used to optimize performance.

The next step would be to co-package the memory chips with the GPU to reduce lateral board delays, and we have seen that in products such as the Sony RSX chip in the PS3 gaming system. And after that, lay out the GPU for through-silicon vias - but that will be another story..

Top

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________