Shifting from SDR to DDR2 Will Save You Money and Improve Performance
We love cars. As often as not, when Micron employees are chatting at the water cooler or conversing over lunch, automobiles are the topic of choice. Like more than 100 million folks around the world, we love the sensation of driving, hugging curves, and accelerating. But we also love being safe and having an in-dash entertainment and navigation system.
Our fascination spills over into our working life. At Micron, we’re not just automotive memory makers; we’re automotive industry watchers and automotive market strategists. That’s why we recommend DDR2 as one of the best choices for new automotive systems designs.
DDR2 Delivers Superior Performance
Increasingly, automotive systems are demanding more and more memory bandwidth. For example, in a typical FPGA platform for automotive entertainment, there might be as many as six IP cores sharing a common memory, including two cores driving displays, two processing video sources, another running soft-processor tasks, and one processing images, for a total bandwidth requirement of up to 640 Mb/s or more. A typical 32-bit SDR running at 100 MHz has 800 Mb/s of bandwidth, leaving just 160 Mb/s of available memory bandwidth for arbitration and access. Now consider our DDR2-1066 memory, which offers breakneck speeds of up to 1,066 Mb/s. What’s more, we can provide the technical expertise to help you segway from to higher-performance DDR2.
DDR2 Is Cost Effective
DDR2 is now the mainstream choice for memory solutions. It’s no secret that when a memory is mainstream, it’s less expensive. Simply put, we’re making more DDR2 than legacy DRAM technologies.
As recently as December 2007, iSuppli forecast that 512Mb-equivilent DDR2 prices would fall in the fourth quarter of 2008 and then slip even further in 2009 and in 2010. By comparison, SDR 512Mb equivalents in Q4 2008 are expected to be twice as expense as DDR2. So designing in DDR2 should save you money.
Making the DDR2 Transition
Better performance and better prices are pretty good reasons to use DDR2 in your next design. But it won’t be easy. You’ll have some work to do. But we can help with that too. We understand many of the challenges involved in switching to DDR2, and we’re ready to give you a helping hand. Download a whitepaper about the evolution of DRAM, DDR2: The New DRAM Standard.