Samsung Electronics is pushing to dominate the market for next-generation mobile memory chips through development partnerships with multiple customers, including Apple. The Korean tech giant is creating Low Power Wide I/O (LPW) DRAM, sometimes called “mobile HBM,” which stacks multiple LPDDR memory chips to significantly boost performance.
According to industry sources, Samsung is advancing development faster than competitors and is leading standardization efforts through the JEDEC consortium, potentially securing specifications favorable to its technology. Samsung’s recently published datasheet shows the LPW DRAM achieves 204.8GB per second transfer speeds while consuming just 1.87 picojoules of energy, substantially outperforming current LPDDR5X memory.
The new memory technology increases input/output connections to 512, eight times more than existing solutions, using what Samsung calls Vertical Wire Bonding packaging technology. This approach differs slightly from rival SK Hynix’s Vertical Fan-Out method, though both stack LPDDR DRAM in a stair-like configuration.
Industry analysts expect LPW DRAM to follow high-bandwidth memory’s trend toward customization as it will likely be supplied in system-in-package configurations with mobile processors. Samsung anticipates mass production will begin around 2028, targeting growing demand from on-device AI applications in mobile devices.
