The QDR Consortium, which includes Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Renesas Electronics, today announced the industry's fastest Quad Data Rate (QDR) SRAM devices (static random access memory).

The new memory devices will be named QDRII+ Xtreme and will operate at clock speeds as fast as 633 megahertz (MHz). They will be fit-, form- and function-compatible with existing QDR II+ devices, allowing manufacturers of network switches, routers and aggregation platforms to boost performance by simply increasing clock speeds within the system without any board design changes.

The new QDR II+ Xtreme SRAMs will be offered with either x18 or x36 word widths, and with bursts of 4 or 2 access. The burst of 4 devices delivers a random transaction rate (RTR) of 633 million random transactions per second, operating at clock speeds of 633 MHz, the highest available for a QDR SRAM. The burst of 2 offerings operate at a frequency of 450 MHz and offer an RTR of 900 million random transactions per second, which doubles the RTR of the prior generation burst of 4 devices running at the same frequency. The random transaction rate is defined as the number of fully random memory accesses per second and is the critical memory metric enabling increased line/switching rates.

First engineering samples of the 36 megabit (Mb) and 72Mb QDR II+ Xtreme devices from Cypress are expected in mid-2011.