Proprietary Memories Are a High-Risk Endeavor
By Gary Hilson, EETimes (April 1, 2024)
Semiconductor technologies live and die by industry standards, but are there times when it makes sense to build a heavily customized—even proprietary—memory device?
The chip sector is replete with standards organizations that guide the evolution of widely adopted memory devices. JEDEC is responsible for DRAM, LPPDR, GDDR and high-bandwidth memory (HBM), among others. The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express Special Interest Group takes care of the most ubiquitous protocol for data movement, while NVMe Express and the CXL Consortium built their specifications with PCIe as their foundation. Most recently, the UCIe was developed to bring best practices to chiplets.
Graham Allan, senior manager of product marketing at Synopsys, has been in the DRAM business since 1985. “The highway of DRAM technologies is littered with the roadkill of non-JEDEC-standard memories,” he said. “If something isn’t JEDEC-standard, or if a DRAM vendor tries to go it alone with something that they want to differentiate with, it’s going to die.”
Among the many abandoned memories that never saw widespread use are Micron Technology’s HBM competitor, Hybrid Memory Cube, and Rambus’s virtual-channel DRAM, even though the latter had the backing of Intel. “These things all die because they don’t have the benefit of the entire ecosystem,” Allan said.
![]() |
E-mail This Article | ![]() |
![]() |
Printer-Friendly Page |
Related News
- 36% of Fabs in High-Risk Zones
- DFSPI IP Core from DCD supports all serial memories available on the market.
- Low-Power Apps, Foundries Eye Emerging Memories
- Latest Attopsemi I-fuse OTP Memories Based on Ground-Breaking New Architecture Now Available on X-FAB's 180 nm Technology
- CAES Introduces Family of Radiation Hardened NOR Flash Memories for Space FPGAs
Breaking News
- Fractile raises $15m seed funding to develop radical new AI chip and unlock exponential performance improvements from frontier AI models
- Ceva Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4 IPs Bring Ultra-Low Power Wireless Connectivity to Alif Semiconductor's Balletto Family of MCUs
- Agile Analog delivers customizable IP on GlobalFoundries' FinFet and FDX processes
- Ian Walsh appointed as Sondrel's Regional VP for America
- Systems Designed Today Must Support Post-Quantum Cryptography Tomorrow
Most Popular
- Imagination Technologies announces new capital investment from Fortress Investment Group
- Alphawave Semi: Q2 2024 Trading and Business Update
- Agile Analog delivers customizable IP on GlobalFoundries' FinFet and FDX processes
- Efinix Releases Topaz Line of FPGAs, Delivering High Performance and Low Power to Mass Market Applications
- Comcores supports BAE systems as a key partner with JESD204C IP