Advanced MCPs for the Changing Mobile Market

An interview with Eric Spanneut, director of mobile memory marketing.

Chris Smith: Eric, thanks for talking with me today. I’ve noticed that Micron has been focusing more and more energy on the mobile market. Today, the company introduced a new line of MCPs; could you tell me a bit about these products?

Eric Spanneut: We are announcing the adoption of our latest process technologies—both NAND and DRAM—to our line of high-end MCPs. It means that we have leveraged our 34nm single-level cell (SLC) technology on the NAND side, as well as our 50nm technology on the low-power DRAM side.

Chris: Is this the first 50nm designed into your MCP products?

Eric: This is our first monolithic 2Gb LPDRAM, which is being adopted by our MCP product line.

Chris: What range of the mobile market will these MCPs serve?

Eric: These products will serve the high-end feature phone market, and the smart phone market that uses open operating system like Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, as well as the nascent mobile internet device (MID) market.

Chris: I notice that this MCP uses LPDDR, but I know you manufacture LPDDR2; when will you transition this MCP to LPDDR2?

Eric: We see growing interest in LPDDR2, but first adoption by handset vendors won’t happen until second half of 2010. We expect LPDDR to be the front-runner in terms of volume for the next three to four years. That said, when the transition does begin, handset vendors will recognize significant advantages with LPDDR2, including reduced pin count, higher frequency and a better power budget.

Chris: So, if LPDDR2 has these benefits, why isn’t it being widely adopted at this time?

Eric: The mobile value chain is a very complex one with a complex ecosystem. It always takes a long time for a new technology to be massively adopted.

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Power and Performance

DDR3 SODIMM: Small package, big low-power performance

If you design electronics, you’re used to thinking of power savings and performance as opposite poles—you’ve typically had to trade one to get the other. But it really is possible to deliver low power with high performance. In fact, we’ve found ways to continually reduce DRAM power needs while still hitting aggressive performance targets. It’s a strategy we’re calling “performance efficiency.” We see lots of opportunity for our DRAM to make a significant difference in a variety of applications—now and in the years ahead. We can save power and still deliver unprecedented levels of performance.

As a proof point, today Micron announced a new line of high-performance DDR3 SODIMMs that run at just 1.35V (standard DDR3 DIMMs run at 1.5V). That .15V difference may seem miniscule, but it amounts to a significant power savings—our estimates put it at about 20%. But the cool thing is that these SODIMMs aren’t any slower than their power-hungry siblings. They can hit 1333 MT/s in stride—plenty of throughput for the latest generation of high-performance laptops. Check them out: view DDR3 1.35V SODIMMs.

Memory: A Data Center Opportunity

New York Times published a feature article in its Sunday, June 14th edition on the topic of data centers. Sounds just like something you would expect in the Sunday Times, no? You see, for those outside of the engineering and technology world, the term “data centers” isn’t as widely understood, nor should it be, really. But it’s important to understand that without these data centers, we wouldn’t have today’s social networking applications. Got that? No Facebook. No Twitter. No YouTube.

As data centers continue to multiply at unprecedented levels, the technology community has been looking for ways to make their products more energy efficient – because these are the products that use the power to keep the data centers humming.

A sneak peek inside one of these data centers would reveal thousands or tens of thousands of servers. Servers are similar to PCs in that they use the same microchips—CPUs and memory. Yes, memory, and lots of it. And as EE Times recently put it “the notoriously voracious microprocessor is passing the power-hog mantle to the DRAM,” consuming quite a surprising amount of power – approximately 15%, according to the Burton Group. And for every Watt of power that goes into a piece of IT equipment, it takes another Watt to power and cool it.

Bill Tschudi, program manager at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, said that the push to make data centers more energy efficient will include several items including improved IT practices and “advancements on the memory side.”

At Micron, we’ve taken a lead on these memory advancements with our own line of energy-efficient data center memory.

To illustrate how our memory is helping green up data centers, let’s compare standard DDR2 and DDR3 memory to our energy efficient line. Standard DDR2 and DDR3 used in data center servers typically operates at 1.8V and 1.5V, respectively. Through clever changes in the memory architecture, we were able to reduce the operating voltage on DDR2 to 1.5V and on DDR3 to 1.35V. This means that Micron’s 1.5V DDR2 can realize a whopping 58 percent power savings over the standard 1.8V memory modules while the 1.35V DDR3 uses 21 percent less power than its 1.5V predecessor. Over time, these energy efficiencies gained can add up to big cost savings while reducing the impact on Mother Earth; something we can all feel good about.

Our commitment to energy efficient memory doesn’t just stop at data centers. We’ve got some new innovations coming down the pike this week so stay tuned (or follow us using Twitter’s data center) to learn more on how Micron is leading the way in the energy efficient memory movement.

HDD & SSD Counseling: “I’m big-boned …”

HDDs are mechanical devices—with moving actuators, spinning platters, and shifting heads. And as such they’re predisposed to consume more power than an SSD … in fact, I guess you could say they were “born” this way. So in this, our second ”Counseling Session“ video, we poke a bit of fun at a really serious challenge as our friend the HDD works to keep up with his energy consumption needs.