DRAM's PC Split?

The DRAM market is also beginning to fragment and move away from a PC-centric market, but that will not change the develop of DRAM's core designs during the next few years, vendors say. Indeed, the core design will remain based on PC chipset development cycles during the next few years. "At least until DDR4, the design of the memory cores will still remain tied to the needs of the PC model," said Kevin Ryan, Micron's director of strategic marketing and application engineering for systems memory. "For DDR3, we are finalizing the standard now at Jedec..Different variations can come out later in the DDR3 lifetime, but we're out at least that far yet."

But on an application level, the majority of devices into which DRAM will likely go will shift away from the PC market, DRAM vendors say. Already by last year, just over half of all DRAM devices sold were geared for PC applications, according to iSuppli data.

The shift away from a PC-centric end-use market is largely driven by the strong growth of mobile applications. Citing internal sources, for example, Jim Elliott, associate director, DRAM for Samsung Semiconductor, said that for the handheld mobile phone consumption of DRAM should exceed that of PCs by 2007.

"We are moving from a very PC-centric area to a mobile-centric era, and based on that we are going to start seeing new [DRAM] technologies associated with wireless chipset technologies," Elliott said.

So why are next-generation DRAM designs, such as DDR3, still largely tied to the development life cycles of AMD and Intel's next processor lines for PC applications? "The volumes for PCs, notebooks, and servers will still remain so overwhelming, so that for a smaller portion of the market, it will not be very common to do a specific memory application," Weidlich said.

Indeed, DRAM has traditionally been a commodity industry, which runs counter to development efforts for individual memory cores to fit smaller-volume applications. "The industry is resistant to fragmentation because they believe the would lose the benefits of commoditization that way," Micron's Ryan said.

Also, while the core designs will not fluctuate too much away from the needs of the CPU, memory makers can still tweak the devices to accommodate different applications as well, of course. With DDR2, for example, vendors can still add on additional features to the core design for specific applications as an addition to the standard. "You can still add partial results refresh to turn off memory areas that you don't use to save battery life in [DDR2] DRAM for cameras and other hand held devices," Infineon's Weidlich said.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that beneath the inevitable news headlines that will see print during the coming months about who's suing whom in the DRAM sector and court-room allegations of fraud, misrepresentation and other charges associated with Rambus, it is still largely business as usually among the DRAM suppliers. Research efforts will continue in conjunction with Jedec as OEMs, suppliers and chipset makers forge on with designs for next-generation devices. Jedec's patent-disclosure rules will likely remain unchanged.

At the same time, the PC market, as measured by units and revenues, will eventually be surpassed in size by mobile applications for DRAM - in less than two years, according to some estimates. But that won't make too much difference in core memory designs that will remain largely tied to AMD and Intel's CPU clock speeds during the next few years. As memory makers ramp up 70-nm production processes and talk about shrinking circuitry line widths and further reducing latency during the coming years, next-generation CPUs will still largely sway what DRAM gets made and when, with or without court-ordered injunctions and the like.