tag: memory

Flexibility Improves Memory Interface Bandwidth
By Ann Mutschler - 10 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 0

In today’s SoCs, memory is the heart or at least one of the main elements of the design. As such, designing them carefully is paramount to achieving the best bandwidth, performance and power. Performance is very important to be able to access the memory and to trade and store information from different IPs with shared memories or local memories. From the power perspective, every access to... » read more

MRAM Begins To Attract Attention
By Mark LaPedus - 19 Sep, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus In the 1980s, there were two separate innovations that changed the landscape in a pair of related fields—nonvolatile memory and storage. In one effort, Toshiba invented the flash memory, thereby leading to NAND and NOR devices. On another front, physicists discovered the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect, a technology that forms the basis of hard disk drives, magnetores... » read more

DRAM Remains The Status Quo
By Frank Ferro - 22 Aug, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro No one will argue that the “post-PC” era is here. Tablet shipments are expected to pass laptops by the end of this year, and desktops by the end of 2015. Add-in the nearly 1 billion smartphones shipment projected for 2013, and you would think that the DRAM industry would take notice of this volume. DRAM manufacturers do care about this segment of the market, but this fact... » read more

Memory Architectures Undergo Changes
By Ed Sperling - 22 Aug, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Memory architectures are taking some new twists. Fueled by multi-core and multiple processors, as well as some speed bumps using existing technology, SoC makers are beginning to rethink how to architect, model and assemble memory to improve speed, lower power and reduce cost. What’s unusual about all of this is that it doesn’t rely on new technology, although there certai... » read more

Semiconductor Memory Aids
By Brian Fuller - 15 Aug, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller It's not hard to forget that semiconductor memory remains one of the most relentless challenges in system design. It sometimes doesn’t get the ink that sexier semiconductor design topics do, but it’s there. Always. Twenty years ago this year, University of Virginia computer scientists William Wulf and Sally McKee published a paper that popularized the term semiconductor ... » read more

Memory Gets Smarter
By Ed Sperling - 27 Jun, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Look inside any complex SoC these days and the wiring congestion around memory is almost astounding. While the number of features on a chip is increasing, they are all built around the same memory modules. Logic needs memory, and in a densely packed semiconductor, the wires that connect the myriad logic blocks are literally all over the memory. This is made worse by the fact ... » read more

Scaling The Lowly SRAM
By Mark LaPedus - 05 Jun, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Chipmakers face a multitude of challenges at the 20nm logic node and beyond, including the task of cramming more functions on the same chip without compromising on power and performance. There is one major challenge that is often overlooked in the equation—scaling the lowly static RAM (SRAM). In one key application, SRAM is the component used to make on-chip cache memories... » read more

Surprises Abound As Subsystem IP Gains Prominence
By The SE Staff - 28 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

What’s new in the world of subsystem intellectual property? To find out, System-Level Design sat down with Richard Wawrzyniak, senior market analyst for ASICs and SoCs at Semico Research Corp. What follow are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: You mentioned that the cost of semiconductor intellectual property (IP) at 20nm and below is increasing. Why is that? Wawrzyniak: The reason is c... » read more

New Materials And Collaboration
By Tom Morrow - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Tom Morrow John Smythe, advanced technology lead for Micron’s Advanced Materials Technology Group, kicked off the 2012 Strategic Materials Conference (SMC) on Oct. 23, with a comprehensive overview of the materials challenges to continued scaling in memory, including a status update on several novel and emerging materials sets that may have potential at sub-20nm. How the industry w... » read more

You Get What You Want
By Frank Ferro - 27 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro Now that the iPhone 5 hype is quieting down, the discussion has turned to the A6 chip that is powering this must-have device. There is much speculation on what is inside the A6 processor. Is it a dual-core A15 or a custom architecture? Is it a ‘big.LITTLE’ architecture? What speed are cores running at—1.2GHz? Others argue that the graphics processor is of equal importance ... » read more

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