Samsung Reveals 2030 Memory Plans

Samsung had its Tech Day where it talked about its foundry business, logic chips and memory business. This year marks 30 years for Samsung’s participation in the memory business. The company unveiled its fifth generation 10nm-class (1b) DRAM and well as its 8^th and 9^th generation Vertical NAND (V-NAND). Jung-bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business at Samsung Electronics, said that half of the trillion gigabytes (1EB) that Samsung has made during its history was produced in the last three years.

Samsung said its 1b DRAM is under development with plans for mass production in 2023. To advance scaling beyond the 10nm range, the company is developing disruptive solutions in patterning, materials and architecture, including high-k materials. Forthcoming DRAM solutions include 32Gb DDR5 DRAM, 8.5Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM and 36Gbps GDDR7 DRAM. Samsung also talked about custom DRAM solutions such as HBM-PIM, AXDIMM and CXL. The figure below shows a DRAM roadmap out to 2030. Unfortunately, they didn’t add an extra decimal point to make clearer the approximate size of 0anm, 0bnm or 0cnm features.

Samsung has made eight generations of its V-NAND products with 10X the original layer count and 15 times the original product bit capacity. The company says its most recent 512Gb 8^th generation V-NAND has the highest bit density among 512Gb triple-level cell (TLC) NAND. They said their 1Tb TLC V-NAND will be available to customers by the end of the year.

Samsung said that its 9^th generation V-NAND is under development and is slated for mass production in 2024. The figure below shows Samsung’s progression of V-NAND products.

The figure below details some of the advanced developments they anticipate in their TLC and QLC 9^thgeneration V-NAND products. They plan on shrinking and increasing the number of cell stacks and also shrinking the peripheral logic array with the CMOS logic under the NAND cells (what they call COP). They anticipate a 50% improvement in bit density for the TLC flash and significant increases in QLC bit density and performance.

By 2030, Samsung believes they will be creating over 1,000 layers in their V-NAND products. The figure below outlines the technology challenges that the company will face making memory cell stacks that high.

The company highlighted its high-performance, low-power computational storage optimized for AI and how it can contribute to eco-conscious computing. Samsung discussed its wide-ranging memory offerings designed for every modern automotive function, from in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), autonomous driving (AD) and advanced driver assisted systems (ADAS), clusters and gateways to telematics. Some of these developments (particularly related to computational storage) are shown in the figure below.

Samsung said that it is opening a Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) in Korea by C4Q where customers and partners can test and verify Samsung memory and software solutions in various server environments.

Samsung announced advanced developments in its DRAM and V-NAND business at its Tech Day Meetings with plans for sub-nm DRAM and 1,000-layer V-NAND by 2030. It is opening a Memory Research Center for customers and partners in Korea with plans for expanded memory use in automotive, consumer and data center applications.