Micron recently announced that they’re shipping memory chips built using the most advanced DRAM process technology.
But a funny thing happened a few years ago in the memory world. We stopped talking about exact numbers and started to use terms like 1x, 1y and 1z. For DRAM particularly, the name of the node usually corresponds to the dimension of half of the pitch — the “half-pitch” — of the active area in the memory cell array. As for 1α, you can think of it as the fourth generation of the 10nm class where the half-pitch ranges from 10 to 19nm. As we go from 1x nanometer to 1y, 1z and 1α, this dimension gets smaller and smaller. We started with 1x, but as we continued to shrink and name the next nodes, we hit the end of the roman alphabet. That’s why we switched to the Greek alphabet alpha, beta, gamma and so on.
To read an explanation into the process, check out this Micron story.