Samsung will demonstrate GDDR7 with a speed of 37Gb/s

The ISSCC 2024 (IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference) is set to take place from February 18 to 22 in San Francisco, USA. Many manufacturers are expected to showcase their latest semiconductor manufacturing technologies at this event. Among them, Samsung will introduce its newest GDDR7 memory technology, boasting a rate of 37Gb/s for 16Gb modules.

In July of the previous year, Samsung announced the completion of the industry’s first GDDR7 chip, with each data I/O interface reaching a speed of 32Gbps. They also promised a 20% improvement in energy efficiency for GDDR7 compared to GDDR6. The first 16Gb GDDR7 chip, with a 384-bit bandwidth, offers an impressive 1.536 TB/s, significantly surpassing the current GeForce RTX 4090’s 1.008 TB/s.

Differing from the current GDDR6’s NRZ/PAM2 or GDDR6X’s PAM4 signaling encoding mechanisms, GDDR7 employs a PAM3 signaling encoding system. NRZ/PAM2 provides one bit of data transfer per cycle, PAM4 two bits per cycle, while PAM3 offers three bits every two cycles. Due to the more complex PAM3 signal encoding mechanism used by GDDR7, the controller requires more robust functionalities, and power consumption may not necessarily be less than that of GDDR6.

To address this, Samsung introduced a high-thermal-conductivity epoxy molding compound (EMC), which has reduced the thermal resistance of GDDR7 packaging by 70%. This ensures that active components do not overheat and maintain stable performance even at high speeds. Samsung stated at the end of last year that they had continually improved the dynamic power consumption of GDDR7 throughout the year. Additionally, through extra clock control, they have managed to reduce the standby power consumption to half that of GDDR6.