The DDR5 Revolution: Promise & Challenges Ahead

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DRAM creates new possibilities for designers, with DDR5 featuring bandwidth and efficiency improvements to enable AI, high performance computing, niche applications...

www.eetasia.com, Dec. 11, 2020 – 

The latest iteration of double data rate (DDR) DRAM offers many advances over its predecessor, and also creates new possibilities for designers building memory devices, and perhaps even the odd challenge.

The JESD79-5 DDR5 SDRAM standard, published by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association earlier this year, was designed to meet increasing needs for efficient performance in a wide range of applications including client systems and high-performance servers. The latter segment is facing increasingly more performance pressures from intensive cloud and enterprise data center applications. Overall, the DDR5 specification provides developers with twice the performance and much improved power efficiency in comparison to DDR4.

More specifically, the DDR5 standard is architected to improve scaling performance without degrading channel efficiency at higher speeds, which has been achieved by doubling the burst length to BL16 and bank-count to 32 from 16. JEDEC describes the DDR5 architecture as "revolutionary," in that it provides better channel efficiency and higher application-level performance that will enable the continued evolution of next-generation computing systems. For increased reliability and efficiency, a DDR5 DIMM boasts two 40-bit fully independent sub-channels on the same module.

Despite the significant leaps forward from DDR4, DDR5 doesn't mean a radical change for designers, said Jim Handy, principal analyst with Objective Analysis. "Since the first DDR, reference designs have been used for all board layouts, and every part of the memory subsystem has to go through validation." That includes everything from connectors to DIMMs. "By the time it gets to the design engineer it will all be proven out, so there's really no difference between DDR4 and DDR5 from a design perspective."

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