Silicon Engineering has strong expertise in the area of specialty memories, particularly RAMDACs for video applications. Our understanding of the requirements for RAMDAC design allow us to specify and design RAMDACs to meet specific display resolution requirements and power consumption targets.

We have extensive knowledge of the RAMDAC market, and have provided RAMDAC designs to many of the major suppliers, both as stand-alone chips and as integrated cores for graphics chips. We provide a 350MHz triple 8-bit RAMDAC macrocell as a standard core, and can configure this to meet a customer's specific requirements, adjusting display resolution or pixel depth as required, and providing gamma correction or other integrated features such as a hardware cursor. The macrocell design is shipping in customers' products at 350MHz but has been tested above 500MHz.

Our specialty RAMs are also used in Cache Tag and Data RAMs in a number of major processor designs. The access speed we can provide is crucial in overcoming performance bottlenecks in the Cache Tag access, allowing fast cache hit or miss detection and boosting processor performance.

Our fast SRAM technology has also proven invaluable in 3D graphics accelerator design, which makes extensive use of on-chip RAM for hidden-surface removal, rendering, and image compression and decompression. Our specialty SRAMs allowed us to double the performance of a recent 3D design by allowing fast single-cycle read/write to on-chip memories, turning a two-cycle operation into a single cycle one, and doubling the rendering throughput.

We also have experience with designing interface issues to large on-chip memories implemented as EPROM, EEPROM, and DRAM, as well as microdisplay memory arrays for LCD projection or head-mounted applications.

Our experience with ROM design allowed us to architect and design a fast half-megabit on-chip processor code ROM with extremely aggressive design goals for a consumer chip. The requirements included very low power operation with an unstable battery power supply from 6v to 2.5v, powerdown mode, and very tight area constraints in a new process technology. We also provided software tools for ROM programming and verification.

SEI can provide such aggressively targeted memories because we understand the system issues and will work with the customer to overcome system bottlenecks often beyond initial expectations.