Despite a prolonged slowdown in global smartphone sales, Samsung has continued to bolster the capacity of its mobile memory. The company said it has started producing the highest capacity mobile DRAM on the market. Samsung, the largest player in the market for chips used as memory and storage, said that the 12GB DRAM will give smartphones even more memory than many personal computers today.
The company's latest line of memory chips adds to its 8GB DRAM that entered volume production last year and doubles the capacity of its 6GB DRAM introduced in 2015. Samsung combined six 16Gb chips into a single low-power double-data-rate, or LPDDR4X, package to achieve the 12GB capacity. Each chip is based on 10-nanometer technology, which limits the increase in power consumption caused by boosting DRAM capacity.
Samsung said that the module's 1.1 millimeter thickness will enable smartphone manufacturers to design thinner devices and reserve space for bigger batteries. The company's latest DRAM supports data transfer rates of around 4.2Gbps, comparable to the speed of its 8GB LPDDR4X DRAM. But the memory's speed is slightly slower than the company's upcoming 8GB LPDDR5 DRAM, which is targeting data transfer rates of 6.4Gbps.
The company said last month than it plans to increase its output of 8GB and 12GB DRAM based on 10-nanometer technology by three times during the second half of 2019. Samsung also plans to increase production of its highest-capacity NAND for smartphones in the first half of the year. The 1TB NAND doubles the storage capacity of its previous 512GB NAND, giving smartphones the ability to hold more photographs, videos and apps.