During Samsung Electronics Co.'s first-quarter conference call with analysts on Apr. 26, UBS analyst Nicolas Gaudois asked about the South Korean chipmaker's mass production schedule for its third-generation or "1z" DRAM chips.
"1z DRAM refers to the 15 nanometer (nm) node," Samsung's Senior Vice President for the memory business Han Jinman said in reply to the question.
His answer, unexpectedly specific, surprised the conference call participants. It was the first time since February 2015 that the world's largest memory chipmaker gave the exact number in public about its next DRAM technology node, or the line width of a circuit through which electricity flows.