Samsung applies advanced EUV to ‘14nm’ DRAM

Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday that it has begun production 14-nanometer (nm) DRAM, which it is applying extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography during their production.

EUV lithography is being widely adopted by semiconductor companies as it can draw finer circuit designs on the wafer compared to the previous Arf laser lithography.

Samsung began applying EUV to its DRAM last year in March.

The company said it applied EUV to five layers of its latest DRAM, which increased wafer density by 20% and power consumption of the chips improved by 20%.

Samsung will be applying this advanced process to the production of DDR5 DRAM, it said. DDR5 has a maximum speed of 7.2Gbps, double that of DDR4.

The latest 14nm DDR5 DRAM will be offered a 24Gb per single chip.

It has been rare for memory makers to explicitly refer to the nm __ a reference to the gate length __ of their memory chips, instead opting to use terms like 1a nm or 1x nm. Though the use of nm by companies itself is controversial, terms like 1a made it hard to tell what was the actual gate length or their equivalent offered by their chips.

However, in January, Micron has claimed it began the world’s first production 1a nm DRAM.

In May, Samsung said its own 1a DRAM was 14nm, implying that it was more advanced than Micron’s.