IBM announces chip memory innovation

IBM Corp. has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on microchips and double the performance of processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with one that uses less space on a slice of silicon.

The company said Wednesday that its new memory technology would help unclog crippling bottlenecks that built up as increasingly powerful microprocessors attempted to retrieve data from a separate memory chip faster than it could be delivered.

“We kill ourselves in the semiconductor industry to try to get a little bit more performance in each generation,” said Lisa Su, a vice president for semiconductor research at IBM. “What we’re doing is trying to merge two technologies ... on the same chip to get significantly more memory.”

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said its solution entailed swapping out most of the static random access memory, or SRAM, used to store information directly on chips and integrating dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, into the chip.

SRAM is fast and easy to manufacture but takes up a lot of valuable real estate on silicon. DRAM, the most common type of memory in personal computers, is typically stored on a separate chip and viewed as too slow to be integrated directly onto the microprocessor.

IBM said it had been able to speed up DRAM to a point nearly equivalent to SRAM, creating a type of memory known as embedded DRAM, or eDRAM. It helps boost the performance of chips with multiple core calculating engines and is particularly suited to multimedia applications such as gaming. DRAM will continue to be used off the chip.