Japanese memory manufacturer Elpida (TYO:6665) has just started sampling two distinct flavors of mobile DRAM according to a press release from the company. The chips are suitable for mobile solutions such as smart phones where power consumption needs to be minimized.
Both chips are part of the company’s Ecoram and comes in a 4 Gb density and are built on the DDR3 standard.
The Wide I/O memory has an interface width of 512 bits and operate at 200Mbps, which results in a bandwidth of 12.8GBps, whereas the standard LPDDR3 offering sports the usual 32 bit interface, but operates at 1600Mbps giving it a total bandwidth of 6.4GBps.
Elpida plans to do memory stacking of the LPDDR3 device with 2 and 4 layers at a later stage resulting in a total density of 8 and 16Gb.
If you run two of the LPDDR3 chips in parallel, you can achieve the double speed of 12.8GB/s. Both offerings give substantial power savings over the previous generation that was based on DDR2 technology. Wide IO gives by far the best performance, but also carries a higher price.
With the advanced stacking that Elpida employs it is going to be interesting to see if it will also offer some kind of integration with logic layer stacking that would allow customers to combine microprocessors and DRAM in a single chip – exactly what IBM is looking to do with the heat conducting gel that is has developed in conjunction with 3M.S|A
Mads Ølholm
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