Confined for now to a high-end niche market, GDDR2 SDRAM is expected to stage a significant ramp late this year following the anticipated adoption of an industry standard that will open up the graphics memory to a wider audience. If approved in a July ballot by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association of the Electronic Industries Alliance, the impact of the new standard would first be felt by increasing GDDR2 volumes and lowering prices, analysts and chip makers said. As they await a standard, three companies are offering different versions of what each terms GDDR2 memory - Hynix Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics and Winbond Electronics. Matthew Godfrey, a memory analyst at Semico Research Corp. (Phoenix), said the fragmented approach has led to high prices, narrowing market opportunities and restricted the chips to use in high-end graphics cards. Card makers, whose products typically have short product lifecycles and an insatiable need for faster, higher-density memory, have largely overlooked the lack of a JEDEC standard. ATI Technologies Inc., for example, has adopted nonstandard GDDR2 SDRAM for use as the frame buffer memory in the Radeon 9800 Pro card it will begin shipping in the second quarter, according to director of engineering Joe Macri. Nvidia Corp. has been using GDDR2 in its GeForce FX line. For its part, JEDEC is trying to reach a common GDDR2 standard by melding clock-timing and driver specifications from Hynix, Infineon and Winbond without favoring any one design. "It would have been unfair to make any one of the three products a standard over the others," said ATI's Macri, who also is chairman of the JEDEC JC42.3 DRAM committee. Source: EETimes Full Story