High-end DRAM Finds Niche Markets
(10:35 a.m. EDT, 7/20/98)
By Andrew MacLellan
Amid the turmoil of the memory semiconductor market, the industry's smaller DRAM players are driving deeper into niche applications to avoid competing head-to-head against ever-cheaper commodity chips.
By focusing on higher-end products where performance is king, these companies are eking out a living as their larger rivals in the mainstream arena succumb to the pricing pressures wrought by protracted DRAM oversupply.
But even such limited success has attracted the notice of profit-starved commodity vendors, which have begun eyeing previously overlooked niche markets like graphics and communications. The unwanted attention, in turn, has prompted smaller DRAM suppliers to protect their market position by ratcheting up performance and lowering average selling prices-a boon for component buyers.
Two specialty memory companies, Enhanced Memory Systems Inc. and MoSys Inc., have closed ranks in their respective markets by turning away from the most common benchmark used to gauge DRAM performance-clock rate-to address the internal speed of the DRAM core.
"We've taken the burst rate about as far as we can," said David W. Bondurant, Enhanced Memory's vice president of marketing and applications. "Improving latency is more important at this point."
DRAM is typically measured in terms of its clock rate, with today's chips reaching speeds of about 125 MHz to serve the PC's new 100-MHz system bus. Direct Rambus DRAM, which companies are readying for market this quarter, will boast a clock rate approaching 800 MHz. But because technologies like Direct RDRAM and SLDRAM address only the memory-to-logic interface and do little to soup up the chip's internal circuitry, suppliers are refining their DRAM cores to cut the time it takes to access internally stored data-a delay referred to as latency.
MoSys, for example, which specializes in high-end graphics frame buffers, abandoned earlier efforts to design a double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM, citing a negligible speed improvement over its Multibanked SDRAM architecture.
"What people forgot about is that the only thing that DDR doubled was the data rate," said Andr‚ Hassan, director of marketing for MoSys.
"The overhead and the access didn't change. It was the same old core, polished and polished."
MoSys, Sunnyvale, Calif., today will roll out a family of 16-Mbit SGRAMs in an effort to distinguish itself from the glut of cheap 16-Mbit SDRAMs that have spilled over from the PC market into graphics applications. Starting at $8 in volume, MoSys' line includes 125- to 200-MHz speed options, with a two-cycle column address strobe (CAS) latency supported through the 166-MHz version. MoSys is aiming the chips at 64- and 128-bit 3D graphics accelerators, and touts a 3.2-Gbyte/s block-fill rate and 800-Mbyte/s read/write throughput.
Enhanced Memory, meanwhile, has engaged the graphics and communications markets with its Enhanced SDRAM (ESDRAM). The company said it has even found design wins in workstation, notebook, and low-end PC sockets.
The Colorado Springs, Colo., company today will also hike its ESDRAM speeds, delivering a two-cycle CAS latency in a chip clocked at 200 MHz. The 16-Mbit device achieves a 36-ns clock access time-considerably faster than the 80-ns access of a typical DRAM that meets Intel Corp.'s PC-100 system-bus specification, or the 70-ns access time of a Direct RDRAM chip, Bondurant said.
ESDRAM's performance has secured chipset support from Motorola's PowerQUICC processor family, V3's PCI bridge for MIPS processors, and Analog Devices' low-cost SHARC DSP.
From a manufacturing standpoint, Siemens Semiconductor Group and IBM Microelectronics have both signed on as foundry sources. Siemens has gone so far as to grant Enhanced Memory rights to its 0.2-micron process technology, allowing the company to move to a 64-Mbit density in 1999 and compete effectively in the PC market, according to Bondurant.
Whether such niche companies will succeed in a commodity world, however, is doubtful, according to observers. ESDRAM, for example, gets its performance boost through the use of two 8-Mbit DRAM banks and two 4-Kbit, 10-ns SRAM page caches, an addition that tacks 10% onto the size of the die and yields a device twice the cost of a standard 16-Mbit SDRAM.
"With its speed and low latency, [ESDRAM] really has a fit in the communications market," said Sherry Garber, memory analyst for Semico Research Corp., Phoenix. "But there are a lot of challenges to overcome if they're going to play in the main memory market. I'm still skeptical about seeing them on the desktop, and I don't know why they would want to be there."
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