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

To: Jdaasoc who wrote (37779)	3/3/2000 9:05:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Thanks for the slides on JAZiO. From the looks of it, it seems that JAZiO is taking a totally radical new approach at signaling interfaces between chips in a system. Conventional technologies use high and low voltages to designate '1' and '0' logic states. But JAZiO uses voltages to signal 'change' or 'no change' in the logic state. Then through the use of advanced techniques which are way over my head, JAZiO is able to transmit more data per pin than even Rambus. Supposedly JAZiO allows for relaxed "slew rates" (the rate at which a signal's voltage changes, which determines the maximum clock speed), which means more bandwidth with less electrical hassle. If the theory is sound, which I can't tell at the moment, then all that is needed is a viable business strategy from JAZiO. They could potentially become a competitor to Rambus, but as we all know, the superiority of a technology is only half of the formula for success. The other half is execution, where we find out whether there are any hidden "gotchas" in JAZiO's technology. Tenchusatsu

To: Jdaasoc who wrote (37779)	3/4/2000 6:30:00 AM
From: John Walliker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

John, Where are the hell are bilow, John W. and the rest of the ee's when you need them. I'm still here! I looked at the JAZZio presentation. It is hard to assess it at present because the presentation does not tell the complete story. There is nothing new about non-return-to-zero signalling, which is used in many networking applications. It does have some significant advantages for long transmission distances because with the right protocols it can reduce the spread of frequencies and hence dispersion where some frequencies travel at different speeds from others. However, JAZZio does not as far as I can see place such a protocol on top of the signals. I don't think that the signal integrity will be as good as Rambus, because the bus drivers are constant voltage rather than constant current. This means that when the length of the bus becomes longer than the duration of one bit there will be multiple devices turned on at the same time if the bus is to operate at maximum efficiency. An inevitable consequence of this is reflections between the multiple drivers when they are turned on. Rambus overcomes that problem by using constant current drivers that allow signal to pass through a "turned on" driver without being affected or reflected. Hence as bus speeds scale up to many GHz the JAZZio scheme will have a hard bus length limit that Rambus will not be subject to. John