Renesas Electronics intros next-gen 1.1Gb low-latency, high-speed memory devices

SANTA CLARA, USA: Renesas Electronics Corp. has announced the availability of its 1.1 gigabit (Gb) memory devices for use in networking equipment, including switches and routers for the next-generation Ethernet standard (100GbE) and beyond.

The new network memory devices provide low power consumption, large capacity and high speed in one chip. Compared to Renesas Electronics’ existing 288 megabit (Mbit) low-latency DRAM devices, the new devices feature 4x the memory capacity, a 30-percent faster random-cycle performance for high-speed data reads and writes, and twice the operating frequency. Despite these significant performance improvements, the new devices still hold memory power consumption to the same level as the existing products.

The volume of network traffic continues to grow rapidly, especially with the widespread adoption of media-rich smartphones, digital media players, and internet-enabled digital cameras. To process this traffic smoothly, data equipment on the network, such as switches and routers, is required to process increasingly larger amounts of data per-unit time.

As a result, there is growing demand for increased capacity and faster speeds, not only in the buffer memory used to hold this data temporarily within network equipment, but also in the table memory used to assign transfer destinations to this data.

Furthermore, reducing the power consumption of network equipment to help achieve an ecological society on a global scale is now seen as extremely important, and thus there is an increasing need for reduced power consumption in the memory used in this equipment.

To address these needs, Renesas Electronics has developed new memory devices that achieve higher capacities and speeds, while at the same time reducing power consumption by taking advantage of its unique process and circuit technologies.