Rambus Develops Really Fast Memory for Future Electronics

Posted 01/31/2011 at 8:17am | by Paul Lilly

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Usually when Rambus makes headlines, it's because the company is suing someone over an alleged patent violation, but that isn't the case today. Rambus is in the news because the company claims it made several breakthroughs in differential memory signaling, pushing SoC-to-memory interfaces to a groundbreaking 20Gb/s. This, Rambus says, can extend single-ended memory signaling to 12.8Gb/s.

"We have paved multiple paths for the industry by providing solutions that extend single-ended signaling beyond today's limits and developing the means for a seamless transition to differential signaling," said Sharon Hold, senior vice president and general manager of the Semiconductor Business Group at Rambus. "By advancing data rates in an extremely power-efficient way, and enabling compatibility to current industry-standard memories, we have removed the technical and business barriers for customers to achieve unprecedented capabilities in their products."

According to Rambus, these breakthroughs in signaling will be a boon to graphics card and game consoles, particularly as tomorrow's GPUs look to jump from 128GB/s of memory bandwidth all the way up to 1TB/s and beyond. What this ultimately means is that tomorrow's systems will be able to produce better graphics at lower costs, and consume less power while doing so, Rambus says. It should also be noted that this technology is backward compatible with GDDR5 and DDR3 memory chips.

Image Credit: Rambus