Japanese Elpida today announced the availability of 512 Megabit XDR DRAM devices in sample quantities.
The new devices operate at 4.0 GHz data rate, providing a data transfer rate of 8.0 Gigabytes per second (GB/s) within a single device for digital consumer electronics applications such as high definition televisions (HDTV), gaming consoles and home entertainment server systems that require high bandwidth to support 3-D graphics. XDR DRAM is based on the XDR memory interface architecture developed by Rambus.
Rambus has also announced the XDR2 technology, the latest version of its high-bandwidth XDR memory interface technology. XDR2 DRAM devices are targeting 8.0GHz data rates, enabling a single DRAM device with 16GB/s of peak bandwidth.
Technical Details
Elpida's 512 Megabit XDR DRAM devices are organized as 4M words x 16-bits x 8 banks and with 4.0 GHz operation and 8.0 Gigabytes per second (GB/s) data transfer rate, more than 4 times the peak bandwidth of industry-standard DDR2 memory devices. They are manufactured using Elpida's 90 nm process technology and are available in 104-ball FBGA packages.
To support both high speed and robust data transfer, the devices utilize advanced Rambus-specific features such as Differential Rambus Signal Level (DRSL) interface, which minimizes the signal swing and noise, and Octal Data Rate (ODR) which transfers 8 bits per clock cycle to achieve 4.0 GHz operation even with the commonly used 400 MHz clock. The 512 Megabit XDR devices also feature programmable on-chip termination, adaptive impedance matching, dynamic request scheduling and zero overhead refresh.
Elpida's 512 Megabit XDR DRAM devices (Part number: EDX5116ACSE) are currently sampling to customers. Volume production is expected to begin based on market demand.