Samsung Claims Speed Advantage on New SRAM Chips

Computergram International, June 4, 1999

Samsung Electronics Co claims that its new 16Mb static RAM (SRAM) has the highest bandwidth available for network applications. The chip has a clockspeed of 150MHz, rather than 66MHz or 100MHz, so can read and write data faster, which means fewer bottlenecks in data traffic applications. The Korean company says that samples have been delivered to several major networking companies, which will consider the chips for use in switches and routers. 4Mb and 8Mb versions of the semiconductor are already on the market.

SRAM is called "static" because it will retain a value as long as power is supplied, unlike dynamic random access memory (DRAM) which must be refreshed regularly. A static RAM bit is made up of a flip-flop circuit that lets current flow through one side or the other based on which one of two transistors is activated. SRAMs do not require refresh circuitry but they take up more space and use more power than DRAMs. It usually costs more per bit than DRAM and so is used for applications where high data transfer speeds are required, such as PC cache memory and networking applications.