Peter Clarke EE Times (02/24/2010 5:53 AM EST)

LONDON — Memory chip vendor Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., has announced it has begun mass production of a 4-Gbit DDR3 devices using 40-nm process technology.

Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president of memory marketing at Samsung, described the memory as an ultra-low power Green Memory, claiming it had been optimized to enhance energy-efficiency ratings for servers seeking to comply with or exceed new Energy Star power consumption specifications.

Production of the 4Gb DDR3 raises the amount of memory for use in servers to 32Gigabytes (GB) per module, which is twice the maximum density achieved with modules based on 2Gb components.

With the start of volume 4-Gbit DDR3 production, Samsung plans to migrate more than 90 percent of its DDR DRAM production to 40-nm process technologies,

Today, servers are equipped with an average of six registered dual in-line memory module (RDIMMs) sockets per CPU, with which up to a 96-Gbytes of DRAM capacity can be accommodated. A module based on 60-nm 1-Gbit DDR2 components consumes 210 watts, Samsung said, while a 40-nm 2-Gbit DDR3-based module consumes 55 watts. The 40-nm 4-Gbit DDR3-based module consumes 36 watts.

The 4-Gbit DDR3 supports both 1.5 and 1.35-V specifications. Available memory modules include 16- and 32-Gbyte RDIMMs and 8-Gbyte SoDIMMs with a 1.6-gigabit per second data transmission.

Related links and articles:

Samsung rolls 30-nm-class DRAMs

Samsung bets on ARM's Mali for graphics

Micron, Nanya announce 42-nm DRAM process