Found this to be interesting. Something CPQ could get into as well?? Not having much of a technical background I'm not sure.
Military specialist touts stacked-DRAM modules --
Dense-Pac going commercial
By Ron Wilson
Garden Grove, Calif. - Armed with a new chief executive and a unique
packaging capability, Dense-Pac Microsystems Inc. is moving beyond its
military electronics niche to look for commercial customers. "Our job
now is
to let designers know that we are a cost-effective alternative for any
kind of
commercial system where space is at a premium," said Uri Levy, the
company's new chairman and chief executive.
Dense-Pac's specialty is the stacking of DRAMs. It has a wide range of
memory modules that consist of thin-packed DRAMs stacked one atop the
other. The resulting stack has the same footprint and pin-out as a
single
DRAM-except for separate chip-enable signals-but with the capacity of
many chips, not one.
For years the company has marketed its modules to the military airborne
and
ground-vehicle markets. But as the company needs to grow and the
military
now needs to shrink, Dense-Pac has turned to other markets. Obvious
applications are handheld systems, automotive systems and other such
areas
where board area is a vital statistic.
But the move to the commercial world required some adjustments.
"When I came here there was no system for mass production of our
modules," Levy said. "There wasn't even a data book engineers could use
to
specify our components."
Production technique
Levy has set about reorienting the technically strong company to the
commercial world. He has helped produce a CD-ROM data book, revamp
the company's Web site and fund the development of a production
technique
for the company's stacked packaging.
The moves have already brought in at least one new account. IBM Corp.'s
System 390 desktop group is supplying IBM-made DRAMs to Dense-Pac
for repackaging; IBM then assembles the stacked devices into 1-Gbyte
plug-in memory boards.
In other commercial oppor-tunities, Dense-Pac is aiming stacked
SRAM/ROM combinations and SRAM/flash combinations to such
applications as cellular handsets and digital cameras.
In the future, the company expects to move beyond memory, Levy said. IBM
has expressed interest in stacking CPUs in ball-grid arrays for a
multiprocessing application, so Dense-Pac is working out the technology
to
stack high-I/O chips with dissimilar pin-outs. This could produce-if
power
dissipation permits-a stacked component that includes CPU, memory and
peripherals for an embedded processor, all within the footprint of a
single
chip. |
