NEC, ARM In Agreement

Electronic News, August 24, 1998

Under the agreement the companies plan to develop a memory controller to interface with NEC's 64-megabit virtual channel synchronous DRAM (VC SDRAM) and ARM-based microcontrollers.

ARM and NEC are targeting the memory controller toward markets that demand higher performance memory such as computing, multimedia, server and other embedded high end applications. The controller will allow system-on-a-chip devices powered by ARM processors to interface with NEC's VC SDRAM technology, a move that both companies claim will result in a 50 percent increase in system performance and a 30 percent reduction in memory power consumption.

Virtual channel memory (VCM) technology is said to decrease the time it takes to retrieve data from the memory by storing the data temporarily in multiple channels between the input/output terminals and memory cells. This is claimed to allow the memory chip to prepare other memory data in a separate channel while reading or writing the current data. This, in turn, results in the 50 percent increase in system performance and reduction in memory power consumption both companies are boasting.

"NEC's goal all along, has been to promote VCM as an industry standard and make it available to core logic and memory manufacturers alike," said Will Mulhern, product marketing manager of the memory business unit at NEC Electronics.

NEC's VC SDRAM is sampling with volume production slated to begin in October. The memory controller macrocell is licensed from ARM in synthesizable VHDL and Verilog formats and is compatible with ARM's on-chip bus system bus architecture, dubbed the AMBA bus. ARM plans to have the macrocell available in 4Q98.