Following the interest shown in it by Toshiba Corp (CI No 1,883), Rambus Inc’s high-speed chip interconnection technology has now caught the eye of Hitachi Ltd, which has bought a licence to the technology. The Mountain View, California company’s technology replaces the control signals and multiplexed address of a conventional random access memory chip with a packet-oriented bus, clocked at 250MHz, which transfers one 9-bit byte every 2nS – 10 times the speed of a conventional memory chip. Toshiba Corp is using the technology in a 4M-bit CMOS dynamic, but Hitachi Ltd is not saying exactly what its plans are beyond noting that it will convert the Rambus Interface circuitry into one of its leading edge logic processes, enabling it to make an application-specific product, in standard low cost packaging, that will transmit a byte every 2nS over traditional circuit board lines. It will also look at memory chips.
