IBM pushes SRAM at 6GHz

IBM RESEARCHERS MANAGED to demonstrate embedded SRAM working at a 6GHz frequency. This type of memory works as the cache memory for today's processors and often is limiting factor in clocking up the chip.

At the VLSI Circuits Symposium in Kyoto, Japan, IBM scientists demonstrated a chip that had embedded SRAM memory, safely working at 6 GHz frequency.

The chip was manufactured on a 65nm SOI process, putting to rest whispers that you could not manufacture a chip over 4GHz when using Silicon On Insulator. In order to achieve that and eliminate problems that were limiting the SRAM clocking (notorious half-select), researches developed several hardware techniques, with one being most notable.

On-chip edge-capture was used for the very first time, for measuring chip-internal signal patterns and calibrating SRAM cell performance.

This breakthrough is another step in development that could aid processors such as upcoming Power7 from IBM, a processor that will use AMD's Opteron socket.

Nevertheless, this is not the first time SRAM reached 6GHz barrier. In some specific cases of overclocking, one golden Pentium 4 631 was clocked over 8GHz, and 1MB of SRAM memory was working at the corresponding clock. µ