To: unclewest who wrote (11104 ) 12/3/1998 9:38:00 PM From: unclewest Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 93625
rosemary posted this at yahoo. i never saw it before. this is fabulous , ibm is on board the rbus. thomas "DUCK". NOV 11, 1998, M2 Communications - IBM and Rambus Inc. today announced IBM has licensed the 800 MHz Direct Rambus ASIC Cell (RAC) for the company's leading-edge ASIC core library. IBM plans to incorporate the memory bus interface core into its Blue Logic family of ASIC libraries. The Direct Rambus design provides a powerful 1.6 GB/s solution to the growing performance disparities between microprocessors and memory chips, and represents a significant advancement in architecture and bandwidth for high speed memory access. In addition to its improved bandwidth capability, the Direct Rambus interface offers many new features, such as multiple power-down modes and is an extension of the Concurrent Rambus interface. IBM has held a Concurrent Rambus interface license since early 1996 and offers the 533MHz Concurrent Rambus interface in two ASIC families. "The Direct Rambus interface is an important emerging industry standard memory interface," said Allen Carl, program manager for the Rambus ASIC interface, IBM Microelectronics. "IBM's goal is to be at the forefront in providing a core-based solution for our ASIC customers." IBM plans to make the new Rambus ASIC Cell (RAC) available for customer design, in its 2.5V, 0.25 micron SA-12E and its 1.8V, 0.18 micron SA-27 ASIC families by the fourth quarter of 1998 and second quarter of 1999 respectively. IBM is a leader in custom logic, helping electronics manufacturers reduce costs and improve time-to-market with their products through the use of innovative system-on-a-chip designs. IBM's leadership design tools and methodologies, system expertise and advanced manufacturing technology have helped propel it from number five to number two in worldwide sales of ASICs, the most prevalent form of custom logic. Due to its high-bandwidth, low pin-count interface, fine memory granularity and easy expansion, Direct Rambus based ASICs can span a wide range of system applications. Examples range from large memory systems used in workstations and servers to PC main memory and small memory systems used in graphics and consumer electronics.