Rambus has taken a new interest in the mobile phone market.
The DRAM technology company has acquired a number of patents related to system-in-package (SiP) memory technology aimed specifically at the mobile phone designs.
Rambus, which indicated its interest in mobile phone designs earlier his year, has acquired the patents from Inapac Technology. Specific terms of the deal are not disclosed.
Inapac’s SiP technology, dubbed SiPFLOW, has already been used in the Motorola RAZR V3i and the Sony Ericsson C902 mobile phones through separate licence agreements with Inapac.
SiP essentially involves the stacking of different semiconductor die in a single device. In this way microprocessors and memory can be efficiently combined together.
The cost, size and power efficiency of SiP designs make them suitable for mobile phones.
"These patented innovations, which have been proven in shipments in over 90 million DRAM devices in SiP implementations, broaden our portfolio for the mobile market," said Herb Gebhart, v-p of strategic development at Rambus.
As part of its mobile plans Rambus aims to offer designers more than 17Gbyte/s of memory bandwidth from a single mobile DRAM device.