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Rajan Sharma, Hardware Engineer, Cisco Systems
Christophe Joly, Manager, Hardware Engineering, Cisco Systems

This paper discusses the technical and business advantages of developing a multi-mode controller strategy to address the challenges of a network DRAM market segment divided between two competing standards: FCRAM and RLDRAM. At this point, the short- and long-term risks of building ASICs compatible with only one of these standards can be considered to be significant, given that both technologies are evolving and that neither one is a clear "market winner" yet. With minimal gate overhead and no penalties on critical timing paths, the multi-mode controller approach allows ASICs to exploit the bandwidth and latency advantages of network DRAM devices while mitigating the risks of having to deal with competing standards.