Consumer SDRAM combines low power and high speed

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Mar 15, 2002

New and exclusive to Sunrise Electronics, Elpida Memory's 128Mbit synchronous DRAM devices combine high speed and low power for consumer applications.

New and exclusive to Sunrise Electronics, Elpida Memory's 128Mbit synchronous DRAM devices combine high speed and low power for consumer applications such as: digital camcorders and cameras, cable or satellite set top boxes, digital televisions and car navigation systems.

DRAMs are typically considered to be commodity devices, driven to volume production by the requirements of the PC market.

During the past year, however, other applications such as mobile devices, consumer appliances and networking systems have reached high volume status and are driving the need for new combinations of DRAM features and performance.

The combination of high speed, low voltage and low power makes this new configuration of SDRAM ideally suited for consumer applications that need a fair amount of memory.

According to Peter Westerdorf, technical marketing and engineering manager for Elpida Memory (Europe), "Digital consumer applications require high speed data processing performance, and many of these applications, such as digital video camcorders and digital still cameras, are battery operated.

Consequently, these applications strive to achieve high data computing performance while maximising battery life".

Performance and power naturally require a tradeoff in chip design, however, Elpida's new Consumer SDRAM achieves a respectable balance: the 166MHs version operates at 3.3V with CAS latency of 3; and the 133 MHs version operates at only 2.5 V with CAS latency of 3.

The operating currents for both devices are 135 and 120mA, respectively, and the self-refresh current is only 600uA in the low power version.

This low power value offers ultimate power savings compared with standard synchronous DRAMs that have a typical self-refresh current in the range of 2mA.

The recommended temperature range is from 0 to 70C for both devices.

The 128Mbit (1M x 32bit x 4 bank) devices are manufactured using Elpida's proven 0.15um CMOS DRAM process technology.

The devices employ a standard SDRAM interface, and they are available in 90-ball FBGA or 86-pin TSOP (II) packages for flexible design integration.