South Korea’s Samsung Electronics used the platform of the Semicon Taiwan 2026 industry conference to discuss its development and release plans for new high-speed memories. In the near future, the focus will be on HBM5, zHBM and zNAND-O.
Image source: Samsung Electronics
Jangseok Choi, vice president of memory planning company point outCompared with HBM4E, the pure performance of HBM5 will be doubled, and the specific performance per watt of power consumption will be increased by 20%. Thermal resistance will also be reduced by 20%, allowing HBM5 memory stacks to better withstand the high temperatures encountered during operation as part of a computing accelerator.
The HBM5 base chip will be produced using 2nm process technology, while HBM4 and HBM4E will be produced using 4nm process technology. Samsung will begin mass production of HBM5 around 2028, eventually increasing the number of stacked layers from 12 to 20. The more advanced high-speed memory will be zHBM, which will deliver eight times better performance and three times better performance per watt compared to HBM4E. The thermal resistance of zHBM can be reduced by 75%~90%. A feature of the zHBM layout is that the memory stack is placed directly on the companion processor rather than on a nearby substrate. Production of this memory will begin after 2029.
Samsung’s solid-state memory will also continue to develop; in 2028, the company will start shipping zNAND-O wafer samples, which will provide ten times higher per-bit density compared to DRAM, seven times higher read throughput than traditional NAND, and improved energy efficiency. This memory will combine the advantages of DRAM and NAND and be actively used in AI computing infrastructure.
In general, in the evolutionary development of memory chips, Samsung focuses on increasing capacity, improving computing efficiency, bandwidth and energy efficiency. The three-dimensional layout of the chip, optimization of the architecture, reduction of information transmission paths and reduction of power consumption will enable Samsung to achieve these goals.
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