Taipei, Taiwan — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. held the sixth annual Samsung Mobile Solutions Forum at the Westin Taipei Hotel, where it highlighted major mobile device trends, shared insight into future mobile technologies, and featured a “Smart and Green Mobility” theme. The company also announced several new products and production ramp-ups.
Samsung said its “Smart and Green Mobility” technologies, together with a new Samsung green memory educational campaign, should help raise awareness of the potential for major power savings in servers and a wide range of other applications.
Samsung also launched several new products at the forum including what the company claims is the fastest, low-power -GHz application processor, a touch-embedded display driver IC (DDI), a quarter-inch 5-megapixel system-on-chip (SoC) image sensor, and a 65-nm single-chip mobile TV channel decoder RF SoC compliant with China’s prevailing mobile broadcasting standard.
Samsung officials also announced production availability of key advanced memory solutions: a 60-nm-class 512-Megabit (Mb) phase-change random access memory (PRAM) and a proprietary 1-Gigabit (Gb) OneDRAM chip based on fusion memory technology.
The advanced memory supplier also said it has been ramping up production of its 1-Gbit OneDRAM, Samsung’s proprietary fusion memory, over the past two months, and has started production of its 512-Mbit PRAM memory.
The 1-Gbit OneDRAM has a 1.3-GBps data transfer speed, which is 20 percent faster than its previous 512-Mbit version. The OneDRAM chip is also seven times faster than a traditional dual-port RAM-based platform, said Samsung.
The smaller number of overall chips required in Samsung’s OneDRAM-based platform allows for the use of a printed-circuit-board (PCB) only two-thirds the size of those used in conventional handsets. Samsung also provides its OneDRAM with a processor, NAND flash or OneNAND in a package-on-package (PoP) solution that measures 1.5 mm in height and reduces the area coverage of the PCB by 40 percent. This PoP solution brings a seven-fold increase in performance with a 30 percent decrease in power usage, said the company.
The OneDRAM’s internal interface, which complies with the JEDEC low-power, double-data-rate (LPDDR) memory standard, channels data between the processors through a shared data area in the OneDRAM chip, eliminating the need for DRAM and double-port RAM chips when transferring data, according to Samsung.
Samsung says its new PRAM device, which features high-performance and low power consumption, will usher in the next generation of non-volatile memory technology for mobile devices. The company said PRAM combines the speed of RAM for processing functions with the non-volatile characteristics of flash memory for storage.
Because the PRAM’s simplified data access logic requires less support from DRAM, its power usage is very efficient. By using PRAM, the battery life of a handset can be extended by over 20 percent, according to the company.
The 512-Mbit PRAM can erase 64 Kilowords (KWs) in 80 milliseconds (ms), which is over 10 times faster than NOR flash memory. In data segments of 5 Megabytes (MBs), PRAM can erase and rewrite data approximately seven-times faster than NOR flash, said Samsung.
Samsung’s first PRAM is produced using 60-nanometer class technology, the same process technology used in NOR flash production today. Finer technology nodes will be applied in future-generations of PRAM to drive commercial adoption.
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