DDR4 & LPDDR4: The Race Is On!

By _EETimes Blog

July 3, 2014

The race is on to declare the fastest, highest performance, and lowest power DDR4 and LPDDR4 memory intellectual property (IP). This is a decidedly ultra-competitive field, since this particular IP is known to cover a wide variety of ASIC and SoC devices for many different applications and market segments. Chances are, if the device has an embedded processor, then it needs access to external DDR memory. A DDR subsystem, including the DDR controller, PHY, and I/O, manages the data traffic flowing to and from the embedded processor and external DDR memory -- a critically important role.

The importance of production-quality DDR4 and LPDDR4 cannot be understated. Many project teams are skipping LPDDR3 and implementing LPDDR4 for various reasons, but most believe they're getting greater gains in performance and lower power by jumping to LPDDR4. Even without the need for extra performance, some project teams are motivated to move to DDR4 for practical and cost-effective reasons. If they have a product with a life span of five years or more, they believe that DDR3 memory will eventually cost more than DDR4.

All of this makes a recent spate of announcements all the more interesting …

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