Elpida Memory announced December 28 the company has begun sample shipments of 4Gb wide IO mobile RAM and 4Gb DDR3 mobile RAM (LPDDR3) chips targeted at smartphone and tablet PC applications, with volume production slated for 2012.

Wide IO mobile RAM provides solutions to opposing needs for faster speed and lower power consumption, Elpida said. The rising performance of smartphones and tablet devices in recent years has led to demand for DRAM with greater data transfer rates, but in turn this has generated concerns about increases in system power consumption.

Elpida indicated that wide IO mobile RAM expands the I/O width by using x512-bit, a data width that is more than 10 times larger than the width for existing DRAMs, which enables a data transfer rate of 12.8GB/s per chip while operating at a low speed of 200MHz. The reduced DRAM speed results in approximately 50% less power consumption compared with DDR2 Mobile RAM (LPDDR2), currently the leading DRAM choice for mobile devices, configured at the same transfer rate, the firm said.

The new 4Gb LPDDR3 achieves a data transfer rate that is twice as fast as LPDDR2, according to Elpida. A single LPDDR3 has a data transfer rate of 6.4 GB/s or 12.8GB/s based on a two-chip configuration for high-end mobile devices. When compared with LPDDR2 on an identical speed basis, LPDDR3 consumes roughly 25% less power, enabling it to extend the operating time of smartphones and tablet devices.

Source:digitimes