If approved in a July ballot by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association of the Electronic Industries Alliance, the impact of the new standard would first be felt by increasing GDDR2 volumes and lowering prices, analysts and chip makers said.
As they await a standard, three companies are offering different versions of what each terms GDDR2 memory — Hynix Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics and Winbond Electronics.
Matthew Godfrey, a memory analyst at Semico Research Corp. (Phoenix), said the fragmented approach has led to high prices, narrowing market opportunities and restricted the chips to use in high-end graphics cards.
Card makers, whose products typically have short product lifecycles and an insatiable need for faster, higher-density memory, have largely overlooked the lack of a JEDEC standard.
ATI Technologies Inc., for example, has adopted nonstandard GDDR2 SDRAM for use as the frame buffer memory in the Radeon 9800 Pro card it will begin shipping in the second quarter, according to director of engineering Joe Macri.
Nvidia Corp. has been using GDDR2 in its GeForce FX line since last year.
Neither company has near-term plans to use the memory in its mainstream product lines, which will continue to support DDR1 SDRAM until next-generation memory prices begin to track downward.
"GDDR2 must become less costly for us to put it broadly on our memory roadmap. For that to happen, the number of sources has to increase," said Young Bryn, director of memory sales and operations at Nvidia (Santa Clara, Calif.).
Bryn estimated that GDDR2 now accounts for 10 percent of the memory chips procured to support Nvidia graphics processors. "This could go up to 30 percent by the end of the year, depending on price," Bryn said.
Trident Microsystems Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) will wait for the JEDEC standard to be ratified before adding GDDR2 to its product line, said Le Nguyen, vice president of marketing.
Mueez Deen, director of DRAM and graphics memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) said the company "is keenly watching the JEDEC process."
Samsung, the dominant supplier of GDDR2, is designing an upgraded chip that will take the projected JEDEC standard into consideration. "However, if the JEDEC standard is delayed, we cannot wait. The key point is to provide new graphics memory solutions at the right time to meet customer demand," Deen said.
Potentially retarding a price reduction, however, is the fact that several DRAM manufacturers — including heavyweights Infineon Technologies A.G. and Micron Technology Inc. — have so far declined to work GDDR2 into their product roadmaps. Micron is directing its development efforts at an even newer memory architecture, GDDR3, which it expects to release to production in the second half of the year.
For its part, JEDEC is trying to reach a common GDDR2 standard by melding clock-timing and driver specifications from Hynix, Infineon and Winbond without favoring any one design.
"It would have been unfair to make any one of the three products a standard over the others," said ATI's Macri, who also is chairman of the JEDEC JC42.3 DRAM committee.
Yet another DRAM manufacturer, Elpida Memory Inc., has spurned desktop PC GDDR2 chips. Elpida is working with ATI to design a mobile version of the technology, dubbed GDDR2-M, which it hopes to bring to market in the third quarter.
The mobile memory uses a unique data inversion technique to cut power consumption in half during state changes and employs fewer memory banks than conventional DDR2. That lowers power further by reducing loading and the number of on-die termination points, according to Jim Sogas, vice president of sales and marketing at Elpida Memory U.S. in San Jose.
As suppliers try to ramp their GDDR2 lines, however, the introduction of GDDR3 appears to be gaining momentum. The architecture is the subject of a coordinated design effort led by ATI that involves several DRAM makers. Unlike GDDR2, the follow-on memory has achieved a common base of support among manufacturers, leading JEDEC to begin drafting a standard.
"Since everyone has agreed on the GDDR3 specifications, we don't have the division now affecting GDDR2," Macri said. "We will have multiple sources right from the start, which should make GDDR3 cost effective, and we should be able to get much faster approval than the GDDR2 process."
GDDR3 will consume half the power of GDDR2 and operate up to 50 percent faster, according to Terry Lee, executive director of advanced technology and strategic marketing at Micron, Boise, Idaho.
Lee said Micron's GDDR3 chips are made with 0.11-micron processing, allowing speeds that could reach 700 MHz for a 1.5Gbit/s data rate. The device will sample next quarter, he said.