To: Tony Viola who wrote (18179 ) 4/2/1999 8:02:00 PM From: unclewest Read Replies (1) | Respond to
i do not want to be naive but there is a lot of good in that message.Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which is expected to manufacture much of the Direct RDRAM produced in the industry this year, acknowledged the bug but called it a non-issue. "Samsung's Rambus is fully functional and has been demonstrated to work in fully stable systems," said Avo Kanadjian, vice president of marketing for Samsung Semiconductor Inc., San Jose Spokespeople and executives for three other DRAM companies-LG Semicon Co. Ltd., NEC Corp., and Toshiba Corp.-said they've received no communiquĊ½ regarding a Rambus flaw within the past few weeks. Toshiba, however, said it discovered a bug two months ago, since fixed, that triggered a power spike during Direct RDRAM's power-up sequence. A spokeswoman for Rambus Inc., Mountain View, Calif., said she had no knowledge of any deviant register bug in Direct RDRAM Samsung said Intel notified it of the bug, which issues a "0" instead of a "1" during the DRAM's initialization sequence, but recommended a temporary, system-level software fix. Intel then advocated a hardware redesign during the next regularly scheduled Direct RDRAM die shrink, allowing companies to avoid the time and expense of an added mask-set revision. The change, though relatively small , would require a redesign of logic functions on the Rambus chip and could entail an all-layers mask redesign, they said. Even the smallest revision, if it involves making new masks for each of Direct RDRAM's 16 to 20 layers, would take three months to implement in silicon, and another three to qualify, chip makers agreed. In the event of such a delay, suppliers could still get a redesigned and qualified Rambus chip to market in the late fall, about the same time as the revised timetable set by Intel for introducing its Rambus-enabled Camino chipset.
