Silicon IP and chip provider Rambus Inc. sats it has achieved the industry’s fastest data rate of 18 Gbps with the Rambus GDDR6 Memory PHY.

At 18 Gbps, the Rambus GDDR6 PHY IP delivers peak performance four-to-five times faster than current DDR4 solutions. The Rambus GDDR6 PHY pairs with the companion GDDR6 memory controller from the company's recent acquisition of Northwest Logic.

“Memory bandwidth poses a significant obstacle for designers working on performance-intensive applications such as AI/ML,” said Hemant Dhulla, vice president and general manager of IP cores at Rambus. “With our GDDR6 18 Gbps memory subsystem, Rambus technology can unleash the power of leading-edge designs with a proven and cost-effective memory architecture.”

The Rambus GDDR6 PHY achieves the industry’s highest speed of up to 18 Gbps, delivering a maximum bandwidth of up to 72 GB/s. Rambus offers ASIC designers PCB and package design support and access to system experts. The solution also features LabStation development environment that enables quick system bring-up, characterization and debug.

The Rambus GDDR6 Memory PHY enables the communication to and from high-speed, high-bandwidth GDDR6 SGRAM (Synchronous Graphics Random Access) memory. Originally designed for graphics applications, GDDR6 is a high-performance memory solution that can be used in a variety of high-performance applications that require large amounts of data computation like artificial intelligence (AI), crypto mining, deep learning, autonomous vehicles, and high-speed networking.

The solution will be fully compliant to the JEDEC GDDR6 (JESD250) standard, and is available on TSMC 7nm process. The GDDR6 interface supports 2 channels, each with 16 bits for a total data width of 32 bits.

GDDR6 SGRAM is supported by Micron Technology, SK Hynix and Samsung. It is operating at 1.35V and offers higher densities compared to previous-generation graphics memory. In addition, GDDR6 doubles the speed of GDDR5 and provides more than 5X the 3.2 Gb/s speed of DDR4.