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Micron Technology NASDAQ: MU outlined a technology and product roadmap centered on rising artificial-intelligence memory and storage requirements, including plans for next-generation DRAM, high-bandwidth memory, NAND and advanced packaging technologies.

During the company’s technology and product leadership webinar, President and Chief Technology and Products Officer Scott DeBoer said AI is changing the role of memory from a supporting component to a central constraint on system performance, capacity and cost per token. He said Micron aims to advance memory, storage and compute together through higher bandwidth, larger capacities, improved power efficiency and closer product collaboration with customers.

DRAM roadmap and 3D transition

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DeBoer said Micron’s 1-gamma DRAM node is in high-volume manufacturing and will serve as the foundation for products introduced over the coming 12 months. The company expects its 1-delta DRAM node to enter volume production in the second half of 2027, targeting a mid-20% percentage improvement in bit density while optimizing the technology for AI-oriented products including HBM5, vertical HBM and vertical edge inference memory.

Micron also described work on 1-epsilon, 1-zeta and eta-generation technologies, including wafer bonding, High-NA EUV, new materials and other process innovations. DeBoer said the company has confidence in several additional generations of planar DRAM scaling before introducing 3D DRAM.

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While Micron has 3D DRAM on its roadmap, DeBoer said deployment timing will depend on cost, complexity and device-performance considerations. He pushed back on the view that 4F² DRAM architectures inherently provide a density advantage over 6F² designs, saying capacitor pitch is the foundational determinant of DRAM bit density.

“When we look out from Micron’s point of view as the leading-edge technology company, when we look at scaling 4F² beyond where we’re sitting today, it’s physics,” DeBoer said during the question-and-answer session. “There’s fundamental problems with 4F² scaling, that ultimately will lead to 3D DRAM coming in instead of 4F².”

HBM expansion and vertical memory

Micron said it is in high-volume manufacturing with HBM4 and is developing both standard and customized HBM products. The company expects custom HBM designs to incorporate customer-specific memory and logic intellectual property into the base die, while standard HBM products will remain part of the market.

The company also described a future category called vertical HBM, in which memory is integrated directly on top of processing units. DeBoer said the architecture is intended primarily to deliver substantially greater bandwidth, while capacity will scale at a different pace because of thermal-management challenges.

Advanced packaging and hybrid bonding will be increasingly important to those products, according to Micron. DeBoer said hybrid bonding is necessary as interconnect pitches tighten, and he cited both bandwidth and thermal benefits. The company is also developing higher-stack HBM designs and thermal technologies, including heat spreaders positioned over hotter areas of an HBM base die.

Micron said it will use foundry nodes for future standard and custom HBM base dies. DeBoer said HBM4 did not require more advanced CMOS for Micron to achieve its power and performance objectives, but HBM4E will require more advanced CMOS to meet speed and power requirements.

New DRAM and NAND products

Micron highlighted several forthcoming DRAM offerings. LPDDR6 is expected to provide 35% better power performance than LPDDR5, with greater improvement on some densities, according to the company. Micron also said it is working with customers on DDR6, which it described as offering twice the bandwidth of DDR5, and plans a 1-terabyte RDIMM following its recently sampled 512-gigabyte DDR5 RDIMM.

On NAND, Micron said its Generation 11 technology will ramp in the second half of 2027. The company said G11 will more than double bit density compared with its Generation 9 NAND, target 1.5 times the I/O speed and reduce data-transfer energy. The node will use wafer-on-wafer bonding and have more than 400 layers.

Micron is also pursuing what it calls AI-class NAND in two areas:

• High-IOPS, SLC-based NAND designs using small blocks for ultra-fast storage products.
• High-bandwidth NAND using TSV-stacked NAND and logic dies positioned closer to compute resources.

DeBoer said the company will determine the appropriate designs in collaboration with customers, given different performance and cost requirements across data center, automotive and edge applications.

AI tools, investment and customer collaboration

Micron said it is using AI internally to speed product development and manufacturing execution. DeBoer cited a data center controller design that moved from silicon to tape-out in half the time of the prior generation, as well as a data center SSD development effort completed with 60% less time than the preceding generation.

The company also pointed to longer-term investments, including expanded Micron Ventures activity, work at Albany NanoTech on advanced lithography and a previously announced $10 billion, 10-year commitment to Micron Research Labs. DeBoer said the company is collaborating with partners ranging from startup Liqid to Meta, with Micron and Meta recently publishing a white paper focused on optimizing LPDDR6 for data centers.

In response to questions about AI system design, DeBoer said memory configurations will vary across training, inference, edge and rack-scale deployments. However, he said the underlying principle remains that more memory content and bandwidth improve system performance. He added that Micron does not expect memory supply to come into balance over the next two years, citing prior comments by company leadership.

About Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU)

Micron Technology, Inc is a semiconductor company that develops and manufactures memory and storage products. Its portfolio includes dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), NAND flash memory, NOR flash memory, solid-state drives, memory modules, and other semiconductor solutions used in data centers, personal computers, smartphones, automotive systems, industrial equipment, and consumer electronics.

The company also provides high-bandwidth memory and other advanced memory technologies designed to support artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, networking, and graphics applications.

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