Dual-port RAMs promise more battery life

Cypress Semiconductor has unveiled a family of five high-performance MoBL (more battery life) dual-port RAMs targeted at mobile phone and PDA applications.

Cypress Semiconductor has unveiled a family of five high-performance MoBL (more battery life) dual-port RAMs targeted at mobile phone and PDA applications.

The new devices are used to enable high-speed interprocessor communication in next-generation phones that use multiple processors to handle video, games, e-mail or music.

The new MoBL dual ports provide the industry's lowest operating and standby current - 80% lower than previous generation dual-ports.

At 1.8V, operating current is only 15 mA (typical) and standby current is just 2uA (typical), extending both talk and standby times in mobile phones.

Today's mobile phones include advanced feature sets such as the ability to record video, play MP3 music, send multimedia messages and deliver 3D multiplayer games.

In order to address these requirements, as well as increased processing demands, many manufacturers have adopted a multi-processor, or modular, architecture for their systems.

Designed with two independent SRAM interfaces, the MoBL dual-port family of devices enables processors to efficiently exchange data.

The MoBL dual-ports enable communication and application subsystems to evolve independent of each other.

Each subsystem can be self-contained with minimal software design effort for interprocessor communication.

"Shorter product life cycles are driving the demand for dual-processor architectures in multimedia mobile platforms - a modular design approach can significantly reduce development time".

"Our MoBL dual-ports reduce the complexity of wireless handset designs while addressing the increased data throughput and low power consumption requirements", said Dinesh Ramanathan, Product Marketing Director for Cypress's Data Communications Division.

The new dual-ports support 1.8, 2.5 and 3V I/O voltage, with densities up to 256Kbit.

They deliver access times as fast as 35ns and datarates of over 200Mbit/s per port to avoid data flow bottlenecks.

Cypress also offers an 8bit bus width option to reduce trace route and simplify board layout.

The MoBL dual-ports are offered in 100-ball, 0.5mm pitch, 6 x 6mm fpBGA packages.

The devices are sampling today with full production availability expected in June 2005.

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