Samsung (Seoul) said its 40-nm production process will provide a roughly 60 percent increase in production productivity over use of a 50-nm process.

DDR3 is the third generation of double-data rate (DDR) synchronous memory. Samsung and others have predicted that DDR3 will become the mainstream DRAM technology by the end of this year. Some analysts have suggested that DDR3 will not capture meaningful market share this year.

Citing data from market research firm iSuppli Corp., Samsung said Tuesday that 2-Gb DDR3 is expected to account for 82 percent of the total DDR3 DRAM market in units sold by 2012, and become the mainstream DDR3 DRAM product by 2010.

In a statement, Jim Elliot, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung's U.S. subsidiary, Samsung Semiconductor Inc., said the company is seeing market adoption of DDR3 picking up steam.

In addition to 16-, 8- and 4-GB registered in-line memory modules (RDIMMs) for servers, Samsung will produce unregistered in-line memory modules (UDIMMs) for workstations or desktop PCs or small outline dual in-line memory modules (SODIMMs) for notebook PCs of up to 4 GBs, using the new chip, the company said. The monolithic 2-Gb chips each support a data rate of up to 1.6 gigabits per second (Gbps) at 1.35 volts, up to twice as fast as an 800 Mbps 1Gb-based dual-die package, Samsung said.

In April, Samsung said it would ramp up production of DDR3 memory chips in response to increased demand stemming from Intel Corp.'s launch of the Xeon processor 5500 series.