Another unreadable article:
Many other ASIC vendors are working closely and quietly with a few customers, slowly ramping up their embedded-DRAM yields, or are still performing R&D. Silicon Magic (Santa Clara, CA) has leveraged Oki's memory expertise on the 1.25-Mbyte DRAM F/X256 and MSM-7680 (Oki part number) graphics controllers. NEC and Nintendo (Kyoto, Japan) are reportedly collaborating on a next-generation game controller containing a MIPS core and embedded DRAM. NEC's current chip set uses external Rambus (Mountain View, CA) DRAM to ensure sufficient bandwidth between the CPU and memory. NEC also presented a derivative of its Virtual Channel DRAM at this year's International Solid State Circuits Conference. Hitachi's H673M 0.35-µm process offers flexible, 256-kbit embedded-DRAM-module granularity, alongside the company's H8 and SH CPU cores. Accelerix (Ottawa), another graphics-chip-set manufacturer, working with Mosaid Technology (Ontario), will be one of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's (TSMC's) first customers for TSMC's 0.35-µm embedded-DRAM process. Silicon Motion (San Jose, CA) plans to use United Microelectronics Corp's (UMC's) process for Silicon Motion's LynxE, containing 2 Mbytes of resident DRAM and a 64-bit external SDRAM bus for frame-buffer expansion.
Taking NeoMagic's design techniques a step further, S3 (Santa Clara, CA) crafts both its own proprietary logic and RAM libraries. Although S3's approach requires more upfront design work, the company claims that the resultant proprietary memory compiler can quickly generate an optimized S3RAM array for any foundry, giving S3 widespread sourcing flexibility.
Notebook-computer graphics controllers have dominated much of the early activity in embedded DRAM because their manufacturers ship them in high volume, which is attractive to ASIC vendors, and because these controllers support lower resolutions and pixel color depth than do desktops. As a result, they require only 1- to 2-Mbyte frame-buffer densities. Notebooks also value low power and minimal board space, two qualities in which embedded DRAM shines over multichip alternatives. Desktop PCs might also later adopt embedded memory, because with the advent of Intel's (Santa Clara, CA) Accelerated Graphics Port, graphics-resident frame-buffer densities may begin to flatten.
ednmag.com
(No, I'm not a regular reader of this journal, it was linked from another thread. I scanned it and saw the interesting Nintendo reference).
|
