Semiconductors Spotlight on Rambus
CIE talks to Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus, about the latest trends and developments in semiconductors
CIE: Could you tell us about your recent career background and your journey with the company? Steven Woo: I joined Rambus more than 25 years ago, and I’m currently a fellow and distinguished inventor leading research work within Rambus Labs, the research group in Rambus Inc. I work on advanced memory systems for accelerators and computing infrastructure, and I also manage a team of senior computer architectures. I joined the company because the team was focused on solving difficult challenges in memory systems, a key part of computer systems that has grown in importance over time.
I started as an individual contributor working on the architecture of our early RDRAM products, developing models and tools for our early customers. In the years since, I’ve worked in product planning, strategy, and marketing roles before joining the research side of our company. The experience I gained working in these other roles with our product, marketing, sales, and engineering teams has helped me to direct our research efforts in future memory systems and memory hierarchies. It’s been a great experience growing with Rambus and having a hand in the development of some of our products and technologies like RDRAM and XDR DRAM.
CIE: Which market developments are driving innovation at Rambus? Steven Woo: Data centres, AI, and security are important markets for us and are important drivers for our research and advanced development work. All three areas have grown in importance in recent years as computation has migrated off premises and into the cloud. The explosion of digital data has driven the growth of AI, in part because it’s one of the only viable ways to make sense of it all in a short period of time. Memory systems are critical to getting good performance in AI systems and data centres, and as the value of data and the insights gained from it have grown, so has the importance of security.
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As the architecture of the internet continues to evolve and more computing moves to the edge, we expect new opportunities in each of these areas. Memory, interface, and security technologies will need to evolve as well. At Rambus, we’re continuing to innovate with an eye on providing technologies that advance industry efforts to support emerging applications and architectures.
CIE: How have things changed in the semiconductors industry since you started working in it and have there been any surprises? Steven Woo: Chips are used everywhere these days, and the widespread adoption of semiconductors has been amazing to see. I’ve been impressed by the ways engineers continue to innovate in silicon process and manufacturing technology to keep Moore’s Law running. And with the introduction of 2.5 and 3D stacking as well as chiplets, I’m looking forward to how the industry evolves in the future.
Components in Electronics
CIE: What are the current challenges facing server architecture and what are the opportunities for Rambus and the wider industry? Steven Woo: Computing needs are changing, and the architecture of data centres and servers is evolving as well. While performance has always been an important metric, there are other first-class metrics to consider today, including security, power efficiency, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). New technologies are being developed to address some of these emerging needs, and there’s no doubt more will follow in the future.
There have been tremendous improvements in processing over the last 30 years – higher clock speeds, multiple cores, and domain- specific processors such as those used in AI and machine learning. But memory systems remain a critical element, as these processing engines need data to keep them running at top speed. Memory capacity and bandwidth needs are growing as the industry looks for ways to keep memory from being a
bottleneck in future computing systems. The Compute Express Link (CXL) is a good example of a new technology designed to address the need for better memory systems and presents an opportunity for the industry to evolve server and data centre architectures in the pursuit of better performance and TCO. Disaggregation and composability are newer trends that allow data centres to tailor computing resources to the growing diversity of workloads. The ability to expand memory capacity and bandwidth with CXL, and to support disaggregation and pooling of memory resources, will allow critical memory resources to be shared and used more efficiently in future data centres. Rambus is in a unique position, with a strong history of innovation and delivering memory, interface, and security products to the industry. As the needs of the industry change, Rambus will continue to research and innovate around new solutions for emerging architecture and applications to meet the challenges facing computing in the future.
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