LPDDR5X Opening New Markets for Low-Power DRAMs

By _Cadence Blog

April 8, 2024

Low-power DDR SDRAM has been one of the most widely used memories in the semiconductor market. This blog post talks about the evolutions of LPDDR DRAMs leading to the latest published standard of LPDDR5/5X. We also look at some of the traditional markets for LPDDR devices and how LPDDR5X is opening new specialized markets for the LPDDR DRAMs.

History of LPDDR Devices

The first LPDDR standard, also referred to as LPDDR1, was based on the DDR SDRAM or DDR1 that was released in 2000. The main change was lowering the power of LPDDR1 usages vs.

DDR1 due to the reduction in input voltage from 2.5 to 1.8V. LPDDR2 was the first major type of low-power DDR SDRAM that was introduced in 2009 and had an optional SDRAM or non-volatile memory type. LPDDR2 was closely followed by LPDDR3, which was quite similar in architecture to the LPDDR2 SDRAM. LPDDR4 was a dual channel DRAM device, the standard for which was first published in 2014 and was followed by an optional single channel LPDDR4X device.

The latest official generation of low-power DDR SDRAM memory is LPDDR5, the standard for which was first published in 2019 and has since been extended to include additional higher speed grade LPDDR devices that are categorized as LPDDR5X. LPDDR5X can support data rates of up to 8533 Mega Transfers per second (MTps).

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