EDA Tech Forum Journal—the premier EDA publication

EDA Tech Forum journal is a quarterly publication for the Electronics Design Automation community including design engineers, engineering managers, industry executives, and academia. EDA Tech Forum journal provides an ongoing medium in which to discuss, debate, and communicate the electronic design automation industry’s most pressing issues, challenges, methodologies, problem-solving techniques, and trends.

Mastering the memory maze

Selecting the right memory for a consumer product is a tricky process. Lane Mason and Marc Greenberg offer some pointers to success.

Lane Mason is memory market analyst and Marc Greenberg is technical marketing manager at Denali Software. More information on the company’s memory products and services is available online at www.denali.com.

Since the early 1980s,most of the semiconductor business has been enthralled by the microprocessor, the PC and commodity DRAMs. For all the talk of potential ‘better markets’ and ‘more profitable businesses to be in’, PCs and their brethren came to represent 35- 40% of the industry’s output. They constituted the prime platform for not only computing, but for watching DVDs and sometimes TV, for playing video games, for instant messaging, for surfing the web, and for email. No matter how ill suited it was to performing the multitude of tasks laid at its doorstep, the PC won out over dedicated devices.

But the industry is changing, at first around the edges, but perhaps more substantially among core products and next-generation platforms. There are important features, functions, characteristics, consumer demands, and capabilities that the PC today cannot manage very well. Thus, even so broadly defined a platform has found that its market does have limitations.

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