CXMT Says Its Next Generation of Memory Chips Is Now in Full Production
The Chinese chipmaker CXMT said on Sept. 20 that its fifth-generation platform for making DRAM, the working memory used in phones and computers, is now in mass production. The company showed two memory chips built on the platform at the World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei, and said both are already being made in volume.
Both are LPDDR5X parts, the low-power kind of memory that goes into mobile devices. CXMT said they are meant for mid-range and high-end phones, tablets and other portable electronics. Each holds 24 gigabits, which the company said is 50% more than the equivalent chip on its previous platform.
CXMT credited three manufacturing changes. Quadruple patterning, which prints a single layer in four separate exposures, brought the spacing of the memory array's smallest repeating features down to 11.95 nanometers, measured as a half pitch. New materials and a reworked process made the storage capacitors 45 times as deep as they are wide. A high-k metal gate process, a transistor design long used in processors, cut the height of the platform's core functional area to 6,762 nanometers.
CXMT's announcement also describes the platform's process level as on par with the most advanced memory manufacturing anywhere in volume production, and calls it a milestone for the company. That assessment and all of the figures above come from CXMT itself, with no independent measurements published to date.
