SK hynix today announced that it has shipped samples of 24 Gigabit (Gb) DDR5* DRAM with the industry's largest density for a single DRAM chip. The announcement of SK hynix releasing the industry's largest density DDR5 chip comes in just 14 months after the Company became the first to release DDR5 DRAM in October 2020, further solidifying the chipmaker's technological leadership in DDR5.

The new 24 Gb DDR5 was produced with the cutting-edge 1 anm technology that utilizes EUV process. It has a density of 24Gb per chip, which is up from the existing density of 16 Gb in 1 ynm DDR5, with improved production efficiency and increased speed by up to 33%. In addition, SK hynix managed to reduce the product's power consumption by *25% compared to existing products while lowering energy use in manufacturing through enhanced production efficiency. SK hynix expects the product to bring about reduction in carbon emissions as well, which is meaningful in the context of ESG management.

A report via DigiTimes, citing "sources familiar with the matter", claims that Micron is ramping up production of its 1z nm nodes for DDR4 manufacturing. As the latest fabrication technology available for the DDR market, 1z nm refers to silicon manufacturing in the 12-14 nm ranges, which is the currently densest available process in the high volume manufacturing space. Micron's other fabrication technology, 1y nm (referring to manufacturing in the 14 - 16 nm range), is also seeing increased manufacturing orders as market requirements for DDR volume are only bound to increase in the foreseeable future.

Micron's ramp-up of 1z nm makes sense, as DDR4 will continue to make-up the overwhelming majority of memory needs for the market until DDR5 fully comes online - and even then, volume requirements will take a while to achieve anything that's compared to today's flow of DDR4. Micron is likely banking on increased experience on the 1z nm nodes to launch its early DDR5 products, which will exclusively use that manufacturing technology. Manufacturing increases are being reported to be mostly related to 16 Gb DRAM modules (for the desktop and laptop spaces).