Samsung's 12nm-Class DRAM Yield Rate Issue and Future Plans

TapTechNews June 11th news, South Korean media ZDNetKorea said today that the yield rate of Samsung's 1bnm (12nm-class) DRAM memory is still less than 50%.

This data is far lower than the general industry target of 80 to 90%. Samsung has established a special working group to deal with this last month.

Referring to the previous reports of TapTechNews, Samsung Electronics announced in May 2023 that the 16Gb version of the 12nm-class DDR5 memory started mass production, and then in September 2023, it announced the successful development of the 12nm-class 32Gb DDR5 memory.

The particle capacity of 32Gb means that Samsung can produce high-density DDR5 RDIMM memory sticks with a capacity of 128GB without using the TSV process.

Compared with the 3DSDIMM memory using TSV, the power consumption of this regular memory stick is reduced by 10%, and the manufacturing cost is also significantly reduced.

Therefore, the 32Gb DDR5 memory particle of the 12nm-class process is regarded by Samsung Electronics as the main product in the future. The establishment of this special working group is aimed at rapidly improving the yield rate.

Samsung Electronics also decided to actively expand the production of 12nm-class DRAM. In the future, Hwaseong 15 and Pyeongtaek P2 wafer factories will become the main production bases for this product. The latter is currently mainly producing 1znm memory and will be upgraded.

Samsung Electronics plans to expand the production capacity of 12nm-class DRAM from the current 40,000 wafers per month to 70,000 wafers in the third quarter and 100,000 wafers in the fourth quarter, and will further increase to 200,000 wafers per month next year.