Embedded DRAM technology: opportunities and challenges

Enlarging the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) system memory and caches appropriately has given justification to the decreasing DRAM and disk storage prices. The system performance tends to improve with the addition of large high performance memory close to the processor, where high performance means a fast intrinsic access time as well as high bandwidths. Producing embeddded DRAMs using a logic process will require some additions to the process flow where the process complexity is expected to increase by about 25 percent. Many manufacturers see embedded DRAM as a way to leverage their investment inspite of the additional manufacturing process.