Inside Samsung’s DDR4 Product Guide – DDR4-2400, 8Gb dies, TSV, and 128GB DIMMs

Samsung has posted their DDR4 product guide on their website, and it gives us excellent insight into the direction that Samsung plans to go with DDR4 in the next few months with a lot of data that wasn’t previously publicly available.

The product guide shows us some things we have not seen in a while, like SoDIMMs with ECC, and also some new things like the first mention I have seen of commercially available TSV stacks of DDR4 devices (presumably using the 3DS extension to the DDR4 standard). This product guide would seem to indicate that the TSV 3DS DDR4 parts could have engineering samples available in Q3’14

The first page, the part numbering guide, shows us what dies have been incorporated into the part numbering scheme, which include:
– 4Gb and 8Gb dies
– X4 and X8 width (no mention of X16 width parts)
– Flip Chip and DDP (Dual Die Package) packages
– Commercial temperature range (0-85c) & normal power
– DDR4-2133 speed grade with 15-15-15 timing
– DDR4-2400 speed grade with 17-17-17 timing
No mention was made of:
– X16 width (although page 6 hints at the availability of an X16 device)
– Extended temperature range
– Reduced power
– Speeds above DDR4-2400

The second page, the component product guide, shows 4Gb dies in X4 and X8 width as available now, and 8Gb dies in X4 and X8 width with engineering samples in 3Q’14

The third page, the module ordering information, shows us what modules have been incorporated into the module numbering scheme, which include:
– RDIMMs, LRDIMMs, and SoDIMMs
– 288-pin format RDIMM and LRDIMM; 260-pin format SoDIMM
– 72-bit width DIMMs (these are typically used as 64 bits data with 8 ECC check bits in servers and other devices with enterprise-class reliability requirements)
– Memory Buffer chips from IDT and Montage
It appears that the module ordering information may not be fully up to date with the information in the module product guide that follows.

Pages 5-6, the module product guide, describes in total 22 different DIMMs (of which 14 have part numbers and 8 have TBD part numbers). Highlights are:
– ECC RDIMMs in 8GB and 16GB using 4Gb X4 devices, 1 and 2 ranks respectively, MP availability
– ECC RDIMM in 8GB using 4Gb X8 device, 1 rank, MP availability
– ECC RDIMMs in 16GB and 32Gb using 8Gb x4 devices, 1 and 2 ranks respectively, ES in 4Q’14 and 3Q’14 respectively
– ECC RDIMMs in 64Gb and 128Gb using 4H TSV packaging, 8 ranks, 4Gb and 8Gb per die respectively, ES 3Q’14 and 1Q’15 respectively.
– VLP ECC LRDIMM of 32GB and 64GB, DDP (Dual Die Packages), X4 organization, 4 ranks, 4Gb and 8Gb dies respectively, MP availability and ES 4Q’14 respectively
– VLP ECC RDIMM of 16GB, DDP (Dual Die Packages), X4 organization, 2 ranks, 4Gb dies, MP availability
– ECC SoDIMMs of 8GB and 16GB, dual-rank X8 parts, using 4Gb and 8Gb dies respectively, with MP and ES 4Q’14 availability respectively
– non-ECC SoDIMMs and uDIMMs of 4GB and 8GB using 4Gb X8 dies, 1 and 2 ranks respectively, on CS availability
– non-ECC SoDIMM and uDIMM of 4GB using one rank of X16 8Gb die, ES 3Q’15 and ES2Q’15 respectively
– non-ECC SoDIMM and uDIMM of 8Gb using one rank of X8 8Gb die, ES 3Q’15 and ES2Q’15 respectively

That’s quite a list!

You can read the whole product guide here.

DDR4 is coming. Be ready! Talk to us about how we can help with your SoC designs supporting DDR4.