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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wily who wrote (29133)	9/10/1999 9:12:00 AM
From: John Walliker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

wily, Naive question: Why does Rambus need a heat spreader if it uses less power than SDRAM? Good question. An individual Rambus chip may dissipate significantly more power than a PC100 chip, say. This might occur if a program is intensively accessing that one chip for a long time. However, in that situation the other chips on the RIMM will be inactive and dissipating less power. The heat spreader keeps the chip temperatures more uniform and minimises the higher peak chip temperature that would occur without the spreader. It also helps to reduce the thermal resistance from any chip to the environment, lowering the die temperature and increasing reliability. Increased temperature uniformity also reduces variations in timing that might otherwise cause problems. It is inevitable that all other things being equal a chip which is transferring more bytes per second will dissipate more power. This is because charging and discharging circuit capacitances requires a certain amount of energy, proportional to the capacitance and the square of the voltage swing. Rambus saves power in the interface by using fewer wires, hence less capacitance. It also saves interface power by using a lower voltage swing than competing technologies. John