Infineon unveil latest memory developments
Infineon Technologies has announced a number of successes from its memory development division that will see four high capacity, second generation additions to the company’s memory product stable.
Firstly, the company has released engineering samples of a 1 GB (gigabyte) DDR SO-DIMM intended for high-end notebook and laptop PCs. The module uses eight 1-Gb (gigabit) components that are built using dual 512-Mb (megabit) dies in a single package. Infineon claim the packaging enables the early adoption of 1-Gb DDR-I components compliant with the JEDEC PC2100 standard form factor. It uses a 200 pin connector, operates at 2.5 V and is organized in two 128-Mb by 64 banks.
The 512-Mb density extends to Infineon’s Mobile-RAM family, which also includes 128-Mb and 256-Mb components. With footprint and stand-by power consumption that are both 50 percent lower than conventional DRAM, Mobile-RAM is ideally suited for use as main memory in handheld electronics devices, such as PDAs, smart phones and digital cameras. Mobile-RAM operates at 2.5 V, rather than the 3.3 V of conventional SDRAM, and features reduced power consumption due to several integrated power management techniques.
Infineon has also begun qualification of 512-Mb DDR2 (second-generation Double-Data-Rate) SDRAM. Targeted for use in high-end servers, workstations and notebooks, DDR2 memory will initially offer data rates per pin of 400-Mbps (megabits per second), 533-Mbps and 667-Mbps. Modules designed using the 533-Mbps data rate, for example, would have a bandwidth of 4.3-GB/s (gigabytes per second). The JEDEC compliant, 512-Mb DDR2 chips, manufactured using Infineon’s 110 nm DRAM process technology, are configured as quad-bank DRAMs, and will be available in four-way, eight-way and 16-way organizations. Additional features of the new components include a pre-fetch size of 4-bits, differential strobe and variable data-output impedance adjustment.
And finally, with production volume of 256-Mb Reduced Latency DRAM (RLDRAM) now available, Infineon has claimed designers of networking equipment that support data rates of 10 to 40-Gbps can optimise systems for data packet buffering, IP address look-up and fast cache applications. RLDRAM allows what the company calls “ultra fast random access”, with row cycle times in the order of 25 ns, making it a potential reduced cost replacement for SRAM components.
Infineon expect the new devices to appear in end-user systems by 2004.