Microchip Technology’s next-gen-ready Serial Memory Controller captures 2019 LEAP Award

The votes are in. Business-to-Business publisher WTWH Media, LLC, has announced the winners of the second-year Leadership in Engineering Achievement Program (LEAP) Awards, a design engineering product competition honoring the most exciting new products in a host of technology areas: Additive Manufacturing, Advanced Materials, Analog Electronics, Connectivity, Embedded Computing, Fastener Technology, Hydraulics, Industrial Automation, Mechanical, Motion Control, Pneumatics, Power Electronics, Software, Switches & Sensors, and Test & Measurement.

Top honors in the Embedded Computing category went to Microchip Technology for their SMC 1000 8x25G — the first commercially available serial memory controller and Microchip’s entre into the memory infrastructure market.

Silicon devices with traditional parallel attached DRAM memory cannot support multiple types of memory media with different cost and performance metrics. The SMC interfaces to the CPU via 8-bit Open Memory Interface (OMI)-compliant 25 Gbps lanes and bridges to memory via a 72-bit DDR4 3200 interface. OMI provides an abstraction layer so that silicon devices can utilize a broad set of media types with different cost, power and performance metrics without having to integrate a unique memory controller for each type. The result is a significant reduction in the required number of host CPU or SoC pins per DDR4 memory channel, allowing for more memory channels and increasing the memory bandwidth available,  dramatically improve their ability for memory-intensive workloads such as machine learning and AI.

Data center application workloads require OMI-based DDIMM memory products to deliver the same high-performance bandwidth and low latency results of today’s parallel-DDR based memory products. Microchip’s SMC 1000 8x25G features an innovative low latency design that delivers less than four ns incremental latency over a traditional integrated DDR controller with LRDIMM. This results in OMI-based DDIMM products having virtually identical bandwidth and latency performance to comparable LRDIMM products.

SMC 1000 8x25G integrates an on-chip processor that performs control path and monitoring functions such as initialization, temperature monitoring, and diagnostics. The device supports manufacturing test operations of attached DRAM memory. Microchip’s Trusted Platform support, including hardware root-of-trust ensures device and firmware authenticity and supports secure firmware updates.

Congratulations to Microchip Technology and to the rest of the 2019 Leap Award winners.