Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

I’ve often wondered about die thinning. I mean just looking at sd cards and micro sd etc, it was clear that there had to be a thinning step (or many steps) and it seemed amazing to me that such a complex step could be economically viable. And yet it clearly is. All a matter of being able to operate at scale I guess.

It’s not a step I’ve seen discussed very much, so it was kind of neat to see it discussed front and center in a lay article like this.

On a related note, I was reading yesterday that apparently the real bottleneck for Chinese production of AI accelerators is HBM production, not processors or ASML equipment.

The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies.

The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.

What's the main blocker (other than the current inflated cost) for using HBM instead of DRAM as the primary memory for consumer electronics?

A shame that this should if anything, lead to consumer DRAM prices getting even worse.

Will that be enough for AI's hunger?

tl;dr; This is existing production being redirected to HBM. Which means consumer market is going to get a lot worse.

And the worst thing is that is the best possible strategy for them. It's essentially win-win for everyone but consumers.

- Buyer (AI) has crazy money, so will pay whatever

- Seller doesn't have to build anything new, as the buyer is willing to pay whatever

- Generate ridiculous profits from crazy money

- No oversupply risk in case of reversal

- Return from producing HBM to DDR5 in a single quarter if reversal does happen.

Hold on to your existing hardware, people, and be on lookout for your local deals.

You just know that the AI bubble is going to break and they're going to be stuck with tons of HBM4s.

The big problem is that this will not depress the consumer DRAM market and mean we can all afford DRAM again

The beginning of the bubble pop?

Now make some DDR5.

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About 2 years ago I bought some SDRAM or something like that, DDR4 or DDR5, don't recall offhand. A few months ago I looked at the price today, and it was over 3x as high. That's just insane. Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.