Chip and motherboard manufacturers and personal computer vendors have been lining up to voice their support for the Burst Extended Data-Out standard as the next high-volume main memory. Gateway 2000 Inc, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, Micronics Computers Inc and Micron Electronics Inc intend to incorporate Burst EDO into their future computers or motherboards that will incorporate support for the memory chips. Dynamic memory chip suppliers Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd and Samsung Semiconductor Inc plan to join the growing list of producers, which includes Micron Technology Inc, that offer the Burst EDO feature. Module manufacturers Kingston Technology Corp and PNY Electronics Inc also plan to supply EDO and Burst EDO modules. Chip supplier Vadem intends to support Burst EDO in its integrated circuits for mobile computing. And chip set suppliers the Pico Power Technology subsidiary of Cirrus Logic Inc, and Forex Computer Corp, have announced their intentions to support it on their new controller designs while Dell Computer Corp plans to incorporate it into its future products. Dynamic RAM bus speeds will range from 40MHz to 66MHz, well above the 33MHz bus speeds that can be accomplished using fast page mode or Extended Data Out dynamic RAMs. With Burst Extended Data Oout, read or write cycles are batched in bursts of four, and it is claimed to provide performance advantage of up to 100% over Fast Page Mode. The bursts wrap around on a four byte boundary which means that only the two least significant bits of the CAS address are modified internally to produce each address of the burst sequence. Burst EDO’s predecessor, Standard EDO is already used in graphics applications, and the backers of EDO reckon it will begin to overtake other types of dynamic main memory chips since for processors with bus speeds of 50MHz and faster – 16M-bit Burst EDO chips offer zero wait state performance with a 66MHz bus. Although it is not anticipated that module-based bus speeds will be able to exceed 66MHz for some time, the 75MHz Burst EDO specifications are already being developed. Since Burst EDO is supported as a bond option on high-volume dynamic RAMs, the technology transition can follow a migration path similar to the migration from Fast Page Mode to EDO, say backers.
