Taiwanese firm Winbond Electronics and German semiconductor company Infineon have expanded their collaboration on memory for IoT applications with higher bandwidth products.

They have expanded their HyperRam product collaboration with the higher bandwidth HyperRam 3.0.

The range offers compact alternatives to traditional pseudo-SRAM and is suited to low power, space-constrained IoT applications that require an off-chip external RAM. HyperRam 3.0 operates at a maximum frequency of 200MHz with a 1.8V operation voltage, which is the same as both HyperRam 2.0 and Octal xSPI RAM, but with an increased data-transfer rate of 800Mbyte/s, double the rate that was previously available. It operates via an expanded IO HyperBus interface with 22 pins.

“As a leading provider of memory, Infineon provides a family that delivers high performance in smaller form factors for next-generation IoT applications,” said Ramesh Chettuvetty, senior director at Infineon Technologies. ” HyperRam 3.0 is the third generation of the HyperRam family that supports throughput of up to 800Mbyte/s using a new 16bit extended version of the HyperBus interface. The 256Mbit HyperRam 3.0 devices are now sampling. Infineon Technologies is pleased to collaborate with Winbond to enable broader adoption of this new memory technology.”

New IoT devices execute more than simple M2M communications; they perform voice control or TinyML inferences and therefore need a higher memory performance. The HyperRam family is suitable for low-power IoT applications, such as wearables, instrument clusters in automotive applications, infotainment and telematics systems, industrial machine vision, HMI displays, and communication modules.

HyperRam 3.0 can operate under the same command and address signal and similar data bus format with enhanced bandwidth and the same standby power with little pin change. The first member of the HyperRam 3.0 family will be a 256Mbit device in a KGD, WLCSP package, which can be implemented at the component, module or PCB level based on the end product type.

“Low pin count, low power consumption and easy control are three key features of HyperRam that help it significantly improve the performance of IoT end devices,” said a Winbond spokesperson. “HyperRam significantly simplifies the PCB layout design, extends mobile devices’ battery life, and works with a smaller processer via a lower pin count while increasing throughput compared to low-power DRAM, SDRAM, and CRAM and PSRAM.”

HyperRam is a high-speed, low-pin-count, low-power pseudo-SRAM for high-performance embedded systems requiring expansion memory for scratchpad or buffering purposes. Introduced in 2015 by Cypress, later acquired by Infineon, HyperRam now enjoys mature and broad ecosystem support from MCU, MPU and FPGA chipset partners and users. Its low-pin count architecture makes it especially suitable for power and board space-constrained applications requiring off-chip external RAM. Optimised HyperBus memory controllers are available from multiple third-party IP vendors.

With around 50,280 employees worldwide, Infineon generated revenue of about €11.1bn in the 2021.

Winbond Electronics is headquartered in Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP), and it has subsidiaries in the USA, Japan, Israel, China, Hong Kong and Germany.