HYUNDAI ANNOUNCES FIRST SHIPMENTS OF DOUBLE DATA RATE (DDR) SYNCHRONOUS DRAM.

Hyundai of Korea last week launched its 64Mb Double Data Rate (DDR) SDRAM into full volume production. Already, initial shipments of DDR are finding their way into high-end graphics cards. DDR will also launch into numerous other applications later this year and throughout next year, Hyundai says.

The first deliveries of DDR SDRAM are being shipped to NVIDIA Corp. to support their high-performance graphics processors. Hyundai's 4Mx16 DDR SDRAM provides data rates up to 333 MHz and offers a high-speed 5.3GB/s bandwidth (on a x128-bit bus). NVIDIA's graphics products are currently being sold to PC OEMs and add-in-card manufacturers.

"We're excited to see Hyundai leading the market with a high- performance DDR solution," says Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing a NVIDIA. "NVIDIA's mission is to enable real-time, interactive 3D content that is alive and ultra-realistic. We are confronted by a number of challenges getting there, and memory bandwidth is a major one."

Hyundai currently holds a leading market share position in the graphics memory industry. In addition to the new 4Mx16 (64Mb) DDR device, Hyundai offers a 1Mx16 SDRAM device which operates at frequencies up to 200MHz.

Early next year, Hyundai expects to ramp its 2Mx32 DDR SDRAM device that operates at 366MHz. Later, the 4Mx16 DDR SDRAM device will be launched with an even faster 400MHz data rate. Hyundai is also positioning to launch both 128Mb and 256Mb DDR SDRAM products that will be targeted at servers, workstations, PCs, and other applications.

According to Farhad Tabrizi, vice president of strategic marketing in the DRAM Business Unit of Hyundai's US-based MicroElectronics subsidiary, "DDR SDRAM has quickly become the low-cost, high- performance memory of choice. It has a very small die-size. It also utilizes existing equipment for packaging, testing, burn-in, and fabrication. As a result, DDR is relatively inexpensive to manufacture and offers the lowest latencies and highest bandwidths of any of the new memory technologies available today."

The market for DDR SDRAM is expected to grow strongly throughout the rest of this and next year. "We see a long life expectancy for 64Mb DDR," Tabrizi says. "128Mb volume production will begin early next year. In 2000, the overall DRAM market will be about 85 percent PC100 and PC133, with DDR accounting for about 10 percent and Rambus making up about five percent."

In 2001, however, Tabrizi predicts DDR will grow from about 10 percent to 25 percent while Rambus is predicted to move slowly from five percent to eight percent. "There are so many programs that will be launching products with DDR next year that DDR will be the fastest growing memory technology in 2000," he says.