What are the chances of an inexperienced team of engineers successfully developing the first `designed in India’ DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chip, that too in the first attempt and during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic?
Next to impossible, most would say. But that’s exactly what young engineers based out of US semiconductor giant Micron’s R&D centre in Hyderabad achieved. And Micron says this chip will be the primary choice for automotive applications globally through 2030.
A team of 100 engineers, with an average age of 28-30 years, delivered the chip – a 12GB LPDDR4 (low power double data rate) DRAM – that can operate at a bandwidth of 4266 Mbps with 1.1v input supply.
A DRAM is a volatile semiconductor memory that is used by a computing device for processing. The memory fades away once the device is shut down. It enables faster access to data than storage media such as hard disk drives and solid state drives and is widely used in devices such as mobile phones, tablets, desktops, and laptops.
The DRAM developed by the Micron India team has incorporated functional safety standards (FUSA) in compliance with ISO26262 for automotive applications, which are considered the most stringent safety standards. It can operate at extreme temperatures ranging from -40 degree Celsius to 125 degree Celsius, and offers a potential market opportunity of over $0.5 billion.
Micron says the chip has implemented proprietary power saving options for ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) applications.
“It has been fully qualified and is in production. It is expected to be available in the second half of 2023,” says Venkatraghavan BV, senior director at the design engineering group (DEG) at Micron India, who led the team that delivered the chip.
Pointing out that the three key things for an automotive product are reliability, latency and temperature, Venkatraghavan says the DRAM has to withstand high temperatures, meet functional safety standards, which means it needs to function safely even in extreme conditions, and behave in a predictive way in case of a failure.
“The product we have designed stores 12 billion bits of data. The key is not even a single bit out of this 12 billion can fail over the lifetime of the product, which is 10-15 years in the case of a car,” he says.
What makes this feat unique is that none of the team members had worked on DRAM design before. While nearly 30% of this young team comprised new college graduates, the rest were laterals drawn from allied areas such as SRAM and FLASH, as DRAM domain talent was not available in the market.
This meant that the team then had to undergo hundreds of hours of training in the DRAM domain.
“This was the first project that the team was executing and they got the DRAM design qualified on silicon at the first attempt without any changes to the original design, which is a major validation for the talent we have in India,” says Venkatraghavan.
Not even a single failure, he says, has been identified so far. “Chipmaking is pretty much like rocket science, and the chances of getting it right the first time is very slim. That is what makes this a unique story,” he says.
The team has now made a disclosure based on the innovations made and will go on to file a patent if the disclosure is approved.
The project was flagged off during the peak of the second Covid-19 wave in May 2021, which meant they had to start out with working remotely by leveraging the latest communication tools. In spite of this, the team took only about 7-8 months to come up with the product.
The design was ready by the end of 2021, after which it was fabricated outside India and then subjected to rigorous testing protocols and qualification process.
“It is just simple dedication and hardwork of this young team working in collaboration with global partners and taking ownership is what worked,” Venkatraghavan says.
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