Memory

The top six most significant specification advances made in the transition from DDR4 to DDR5 DIMMs are shown in Table 1 below.

Changes in DDR5 have introduced a number of design considerations dealing with higher speeds and lower voltages – raising a new round of signal integrity challenges. Designers will need to ensure that motherboards and DIMMs can handle the higher signal speeds. When performing system-level simulations, signal integrity at all DRAM locations need to be checked.

Mouser Electronics is now stocking Intel Optane persistent memory, which offers an Intel affordable alternative to DRAM with significantly increased capacity of up to 512 GBytes.

Apacer has announced a tiny industrial-grade PCIe BGA SSD, adding another strong series to its high-speed PCIe SSD product line.

Advantech has announced the release of a comprehensive new software solution package: ‘SQ Manager’ for SQFlash SSD and SQRAM memory products. This package includes utilities to monitor the real-time status of SQFlash and SQRAM products both locally and remotely and to manage security features of SQFlash products.

Featuring end-to-end security from edge to the cloud, the Innodisk InnoAGE SSD comes with a Microsoft Azure Sphere inside and is integrated with Innodisk’s customised firmware, software, and hardware technology.

Mentor, a Siemens business, has announced it has collaborated with Samsung Foundry to develop a new reference kit designed to help mutual customers substantially simplify and streamline the testing, diagnosis and repair of in-fab memory memory in advanced systems-on-chip (SoCs) during fabrication.

KIOXIA Europe has developed and started shipment of engineering samples of next-generation Enterprise & Datacentre SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S, and which is being standardised by the SNIA SFF TA Technical Work Group. E3.S is a new form factor standard for NVMe SSDs in cloud and enterprise data centres, especially targeting PCIe 5.0 and beyond.

Renesas has expanded its RE Family lineup of embedded controllers with a new ultra-low power consumption member based on Renesas’ Silicon-On-Thin-Buried-Oxide (SOTB) process technology and built around the Arm Cortex-M0+ core. The newest member of the RE01 Group lineup is a 256KB flash memory variant in addition to the 1.5MB flash memory embedded controller, already in mass production.

At the 2020 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, imec presented a deterministic write scheme for voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) magnetic random access memories (MRAMs), obviating the need for pre-reading the device before writing.