Thanks For The Memories


By Ed Sperling The amount of real estate in a design now devoted to memories—SRAM on chip, DRAM off chip, and a few other more exotic options showing up occasionally—is a testament to the amount of data that needs to be utilized quickly in both mobile and fixed devices. Memory is almost singlehandedly responsible for the routing congestion now plaguing complex SoCs. It is one of the mai... » read more

Universal Memories Fall Back To Earth


By Mark LaPedus Ten years ago, Intel Corp. declared that flash memory would stop scaling at 65nm, prompting the need for a new replacement technology. Thinking the end was near for flash, a number of companies began to develop various next-generation memory types, such as 3D chips, FeRAM, MRAM, phase-change memory (PCM), and ReRAM. Many of these technologies were originally billed as “uni... » read more

The End of the DRAM Era – Flash Spending Surpasses DRAM


By Clark Tseng, SEMI Industry Research and Statistics, Taiwan The semiconductor memory industry has a long history of fluctuating market cycles. The DRAM sector in particular has gone through a few bad cycles and witnessed quite a few consolidations in the past ten years or so.  However, DRAM continues to be one of the most important and capital intensive sectors in the semiconductor indust... » read more

What’s Next After DRAM?


By Pallab Chatterjee At the most recent Denali Memcon, there was a panel discussion and debate about the future of DRAM and possible successor technologies. The discussion was moderated by Cadence’s Steve Leibson and featured Bob Merritt of Convergent Semiconductor, Barry Hoberman of Crocus, Ed Doller of Micron and Marc Greenberg of Denali/Cadence. The topic of the discuss was based on t... » read more

Soft Errors Create Tough Problems


By Ed Sperling Single event upsets used to be as rare as some elements on the Periodic Table, with the damage they could cause relegated more to theory than reality. Not anymore. At 90nm, what was theory became reality. And at 45nm, the events are becoming far more common, often affecting multiple bits in increasingly dense arrays of memory and now, increasingly, in the logic. Known alter... » read more

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