Samsung's Game-Changing Stacked 3D HBM Memory Chips Could Arrive This Year

A report in the Korea Economic Daily is indicating that Samsung will be ready to start rolling out 3D packaging for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) later this year. This is a key technology that will enable the company to deliver its anticipated HMB4 offering, which is aimed at the AI market, sometime in 2025.

This new technology enables the vertical stacking of HBM on top of a GPU with a thin substrate used for communication between the two. This configuration leads to increased performance in workloads that are key to driving AI, such as inference processing and data learning. The company is referring to this new kind of packaging as Samsung Advanced Interconnection Technology-D, or SAINT-D.


Companies looking to take advantage of the gains offered by 3D packaging will need to work with Samsung’s foundry unit for the manufacturing of the GPU, after which the advanced packaging unit integrates the HBM chips. A Samsung official says that “3D packaging reduces power consumption and processing delays, improving the quality of electrical signals of semiconductor chips.”

Looking further into the future, Samsung is planning on using optical elements as part of an all-in-one integration that will greatly increase data transmission speeds. This is an effort in trying to create AI accelerators that are a unified package. This new technology is scheduled to be ready for 2027.

Samsung appears to be positioning itself as a one stop shop for companies working on chips designed for the AI space as it battles it out with TSMC. Hopefully the company’s manufacturing technologies can help unlock the performance needed for the growing demand in AI that doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.