When Prakash Bare, Managing Director of Rambus India came home one evening, he found his nine year-old daughter, an avid gamer fiddling with ‘Resistance: Fall of Men’ on Sony PlayStation3 (PS3). Bare tells us with a grin, “I've given up on games. Competing with my daughter is… well, it's so humiliating. I am getting killed in a game and I don't even know what's going on.”

Still, Bare is proud to own a PS3. Though he is not an avid gamer, Bare is excited to bring in Rambus’ technology into the PlayStation. He adds, “What makes the aliens and bullets come to three-dimensional life on the PlayStation is Rambus’ XDR memory that interacts at high speed with the graphic processor inside.” Each PlayStation3 uses four Extreme Data Rate (XDR) memory devices which deliver a whopping 25.6GB/s bandwidth. Over 10 million PlayStation3 units have already been sold — that's in excess of 40 million XDR devices shipped from some of the world’s largest DRAM manufacturers. Added to this, Extreme Data Rate Dynamic Random Access Memory (XDR DRAM) is used in other consumer applications. The party at Rambus has just begun as the company’s customer has shipped over 50 million XDR DRAM devices worldwide.

XDR DRAM can operate at a mind blowing 4.8 GHz clock-speed, providing industry-leading bandwidth per pin, which is a benefit for gaming, graphics, computing, and consumer applications. The XDR memory architecture features a number of advanced technologies built on patented Rambus innovations that include low-voltage, low-power Differential Rambus Signaling Level (DRSL) Octal Data Rate (ODR) technology that transfers eight bits of data each clock cycle, FlexPhase circuit technology for precise on-chip alignment of data with clock, and Dynamic-Point-to-Point (DPP) for both enhanced signal integrity and scalability.

The continuous effort of Rambus to innovate new technologies has brought many giants in the industry like Texas Instruments (TI) to adopt their technology. Last year, TI adopted Rambus’ XDR memory architecture in its Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology. This technology adopted in projectors provide unmatched image quality and stunning color, and is ideal for displaying movies, sports, games, or digital photos.

Moreover, early last year Qimonda AG, a global producer of DRAM memory products, signed a technology license agreement for the Rambus XDR memory interface solution. The Rambus XDR solution was implemented in Qimonda's 75 nm process technology for integration into high-volume applications, including game consoles, digital televisions, set-top boxes, and PC graphics.