SK hynix starts mass-production of largest low-power DRAM for mobiles

SK hynix, South Korea's No. 2 chipmaker, said Friday it has begun mass-production of a mobile DRAM that offers the industry's largest capacity aimed at minimizing power consumption and features low voltage operation for devices, including smartphones and tablets.

SK hynix said the 24-gigabyte low-power double data rate 5 eXtended (LPDDR5X) mobile DRAM was first supplied to Chinese Oppo’s latest flagship smartphone, Oneplus Ace 2 Pro, which launched Thursday.

“With the timely supply of 24GB LPDDR5X from SK hynix, we were able to become the first to launch a smartphone that features the industry’s largest capacity DRAM,” said Louis Li, vice president of marketing at Oppo.

“This new smartphone will allow the customers to enjoy an optimized multitasking environment as well as extended battery life.”

The world’s largest DRAM producer said its latest chip will deliver outstanding power efficiency and performance as it has been integrated with the High-K metal gate process that uses a material with a high dielectric constant in the insulating film inside DRAM transistors to prevent leakage currents and to improve capacitance.

The 24GB LPDDR5X package operates in an ultralow voltage range of 1.01 to 1.12V set by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council, and can process 68-gigabyte of data per second, which is equivalent to transferring 13 full HD movies in one second, the company explained.

Last November, SK hynix became the industry’s first to integrate the process in mobile DRAM. It started the mass production of 8- to 16-gigabyte LPDDR5X in the same month, according to SK hynix officials.

Experts forecast smartphones will be essential in the artificial intelligence era since the devices can collect and transmit data to connect the local network to an external wide area network. To incorporate AI into smartphones, enhancing chip memory performance becomes more crucial.

“Our LPDDR products will be able to support a growing list of applications such as PC, server, high-performance computing and automotive vehicles,” said Park Myoung-soo, head of DRAM marketing at SK hynix.

“We'll cement our leadership in the premium memory market by providing the highest performance products that meet customers’ needs.”