Samsung expects that demand for its memory chips will remain high not just this year, but also in 2027. Song Jai-hyuk, the CTO of Samsung’s Device Solutions (which makes chips), spoke at Semicon Korea and revealed some interesting details.
The so-called AI hyperscalers – companies building out absolutely massive cloud infrastructure to serve the ever-growing compute needs of AI – are ordering memory at unprecedented levels, which, in turn, has caused prices to skyrocket.
Samsung is focused on mass-producing HBM4 (“High Bandwidth Memory”). Samsung reported booming sales in Q3 last year on the back of strong demand for the previous HBM3E format and this continued into Q4.
The plans for the first quarter of this year are to sell the newer HBM4 memory. Feedback from corporate customers that already received some HBM4 shipments called the chip’s performance “very satisfactory,” said the CTO.
Looking to the future, Samsung has developed a hybrid bonding technology for HBM. This reduces the thermal resistance of 12H and 16H stacks by 20%. In tests, Samsung observed 11% lower temperature on the base die. It’s not clear when hybrid-bonded dies will be available to consumers.
Another related technology is called zHBM, which stacks dies in the Z-axis. This approach will boost memory bandwidth 4x while reducing power consumption by 25%.
Samsung HBM-PIM memory has been tested in a custom AMD Instinct MI100
Samsung is also working on custom HBM designs that have some compute capabilities built right into the memory (this is called processing-in-memory or PIM). According to the CTO, the custom HBM design can increase performance 2.8x while keeping power efficiency the same.
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