In meetings last month, Cisco managers decided to cancel well defined plans for a Cisco Network DRAM (CNRAM) and opt instead for standardizing on a mix of SDRAM, Fast Cycle DRAM and Reduced Latency DRAM for its systems. The company is, however, working with multiple suppliers on a new SRAM design that would surpass in both speed and density the QDR SRAMs now coming to market.

Cisco had planned to make the abandoned CNRAM an industry standard. It's current plans call for keeping the new SRAM design to itself as a competitive edge against other networking OEMs.

The decisions to nix CDRAM and embrace both FC- and RL-DRAMs came in May from a memory architecture council of senior engineering and operations managers at Cisco. Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung make FC-DRAMs. Infineon and Micron make RL-DRAMs.

"The DRAM world doesn't need another architecture. If you trifurcate the market you end up with very small volumes in all the buckets and you lose," said Richard Ellis, a director of global commodity supplier management who sits on the memory council at Cisco.

"We think working with our suppliers we can get the right tweaks in place for FC- and RL-DRAM to meet our needs," Ellis added.

Unlike FC- and RL-DRAMs which are aimed at a broad set of systems, CNDRAMs were focused only on the needs of routers and switches. Cisco had planned to make the specification for CNDRAMs open for anyone to use.

"We had a complete spec all documented and in the hands of our suppliers and had spent six months getting their feedback on it," said Ellis. No silicon design had been done, "but there were several suppliers ready to dedicate engineering teams to it," he added.

Not fragmenting the DRAM market further and making a public commitment to existing technologies is a good step, although blessing both FC- and RL-DRAM may be avoiding the harder choice of standardizing on one specialty DRAM, said Sherry Garber, memory analyst with Semico Research Corp. (Phoenix, Ariz.)

"I had kind of thought the market would not adopt two specialty memories, but would evolve to adopt just one or the other," Garber said. Nevertheless, Cisco's move is "a real positive step. OEMs don't usually tell people what they have chosen. This will cause other OEMs to look at those parts because Cisco is such a large consumer," she added.

In static RAMs, Cisco is "working with suppliers on an ultra- high performance and high density SRAM. It is on the horizon and is a very aggressive program," Ellis said.

He noted that Cisco took a leading role in the development of the QDR SDRAM now coming to market.

"There's always the need for faster SRAM access times. I would imagine they are looking about two years out," said Garber.

The memory council is one of three high-level architecture groups now at Cisco. The company has had an ASIC council for sometime. Last year it added separate memory and microprocessor councils to help the company focus in on key technologies and suppliers in those areas as part of a broad move to streamline its supply chain management.

By: DocMemory
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