The Week In Review: Manufacturing And Design


Crucial.com reveals a surprising way to gain more time for improving one's personal health: fix a slow computer. A nationwide survey revealed that U.S. adults think they waste an average of 16 minutes per day waiting for their computer to load or boot up. Equating to two hours each week and four days per year lost to the wiles of a slow computer, it's no surprise that 66% of Americans say that ... » read more

The Week In Review: Oct. 11


By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling Demand is running high for DRAMs, thanks to last month’s fab fire at Hynix’ China plant. “The impact from Hynix' fab fire seems to be far more extensive than we had originally thought. We now think the factory is most likely up at the earliest by May/June 2014, which certainly provides robust pricing support for DRAM. Hynix is in the process of convertin... » read more

Flexibility Improves Memory Interface Bandwidth


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 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

Five Emerging DRAM Interfaces You Should Know For Your Next Design


Producing DRAM chips in commodity volumes and prices to meet the demands of the mobile market is no easy feat, and demands for increased bandwidth, low power consumption, and small footprint don’t help. This paper reviews and compares five next-generation DRAM technologies— LPDDR3, LPDDR4, Wide I/O 2, HBM, and HMC—that address these challenges. To view this white paper, click here. » read more

DDR White Paper


DDR DRAM memory controllers have many competing demands on them. A good memory controller must improve the bandwidth of the memory interface while respecting the latency demands of the CPU, graphics, and real-time DRAM in the system while maintaining compliance with memory bus and on-chip bus standards. The read reorder buffer (RRB) is a silicon-proven architectural enhancement available in... » read more

DRAM Remains The Status Quo


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 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

The Week In Review: Aug. 19


By Mark LaPedus Applied Materials named Gary Dickerson, who has been serving as president of the company, as CEO. Mike Splinter, who held the reins since 2003, was elevated to executive chairman of the board. Dickerson served as the CEO of Varian, which Applied acquired in 2011, as well as the president and COO of KLA-Tencor. Applied Materials also announced its Q3 results. The company rep... » read more

ATE Market Changes With The Times


By Jeff Chappell A declining PC market in recent years coupled with the continuing growth of mobile phones and tablets has meant changes throughout the semiconductor supply chain, and automated test equipment is no exception. For example, a decade ago memory test—namely DRAM—was a large market compared with that of nascent system-on-a-chip (SoC) testing. In fact, at the time some test e... » read more

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