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Technology Stocks : RAMBUS (Nasdaq: RMBS) - THE EAGLE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Barry Grossman who wrote (1406)	3/7/2000 10:35:00 PM
From: Mihaela	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2039

Advanced DRAM Technology alliance focuses on latency issues By Jack Robertson Electronic Buyers' News (03/07/00, 01:44:07 PM EDT) A senior chip industry executive this week gave a glimpse into the new memory architecture under development by the industry's Advanced DRAM Technology (ADT) alliance, indicating that latency will be a key issue addressed by the group. Speaking Monday at an industry conference in Phoenix hosted by Semico Research Corp., Dean Klein, vice president of integrated products at Micron Technology Inc., said the upcoming DRAM technology will be "channel based with a high bandwidth and low latency. One of the most significant parameters affecting performance is latency," he added. Klein said preliminary design discussions are only now beginning and expected the first broad standard "to be available at the public level sometime this year." The group, led by Intel Corp., includes Micron, Hyundai MicroElectronics, Infineon Technologies, NEC, and Samsung Electronics, and is trying to develop a next-generation DRAM architecture for the PC market in 2003. In an interview at the conference, Klein said alternative narrow-bit-width memories, like Direct Rambus DRAM, are well-suited for many applications but suffer from a high, internal core latency. In a PC main-memory application, latency is the time it takes for the processor to access DRAM for the first time before a data flow from memory can be maintained. Klein was quick to point out, however, that Micron will manufacture Direct RDRAM in addition to the new architecture under development by the alliance. "We will have [Rambus] silicon shortly and hope to quickly validate our chip," he said. "Micron is agnostic about the different DRAM architectures. We will build whatever memory type is dominant. We just want memory to be dominant." Keith McDonald, president of memory-module maker Smart Modular Technologies Inc., said Direct Rambus has a major advantage in granularity when it comes to the issue of memory capacity expansion. Because of the 16-bit bus width of a 64-Mbit Direct RDRAM, users can support a 32-bit microprocessor while expanding their memory in 16-Mbyte increments. Conventional SDRAM requires 32- to 64-Mbyte steps because it's configured typically in an 8-Mbit x 8, or 16-Mbit x 4 structure. McDonald said the granularity benefit will spur Direct RDRAM use in electronic game consoles, such as the Sony PlayStation II, and in new sub-$500 PCs and low-cost personal Internet information appliances. Micron's Klein said, however, that the low-cost portable devices could use embedded SDRAM memory on logic chips to avoid the granularity issue, while boosting performance and cutting cost. ebnews.com