Rambus unveils XDR DRAM with Elpida, Toshiba

July 11, 2003 (IDG News Service)

Toshiba Corp. and Elpida Memory Inc. will manufacture Rambus Inc.'s new memory technology, formerly known as Yellowstone, by 2005, the companies announced Thursday.

The new technology, to be known as XDR DRAM for extreme data rate dynamic RAM, will run at 3.2 GHz when samples start shipping in 2004, Rambus said. This is far faster than any memory technology currently available in PCs or consumer entertainment devices.

Rambus is using a completely different interface technology for XDR DRAM than used by double data rate (DDR) synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) vendors today, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research in Scottsdale, Ariz. "This is a high-performance memory for high-performance applications," he said.

Los Altos, Calif.-based Rambus doesn't actually make memory chips but licenses the intellectual property needed to make the interfaces used in memory chips to communicate with an I/O device or the chip set, McCarron said.

Rambus claims that its XDR technology will offer performance greater than other specialty DRAM products while remaining competitive with mainstream memory products. Rambus DRAM (RDRAM), the previous memory interface the company marketed extensively, eventually fell out of favor with PC manufacturers after the performance of cheaper DDR memory products caught up to RDRAM.

Sony Corp. and its PlayStation subsidiary, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., have already announced that they will license the XDR DRAM technology for future products. Sony is expected to use XDR DRAM in the upcoming PlayStation 3, because it already uses RDRAM in the popular PlayStation 2 console.

The design is available immediately to semiconductor companies and system vendors for design purposes, Rambus said. Toshiba and Elpida, both based in Tokyo, said they expect to begin shipping products in 2004, with volume production coming in 2005.