Rambus Inc. announced Wednesday that it has acquired the assets of Diablo Technologies to broaden its portfolio in the hybrid DRAM and Flash memory markets, further establishing its position. These patented technologies augment existing Rambus NVDIMM portfolio and complement its high-bandwidth, low-power memory technologies. Specific terms of the deal are not disclosed.
For over ten years, Diablo was a pioneer in the development of NVDIMM technologies for high-speed, low-power, and low-latency bridging and switching products targeted at the server and storage markets. Having developed memory buffer and software solutions leveraging an all-Flash memory sub-system, Diablo Technologies enabled an architecture to rewrite the rules of data center performance and economics.
Rambus’ investment in these technology areas provide a foundation for integrating existing DRAM and Flash along with emerging memories into advanced hybrid memory systems in the future.
Expanding emerging memory technology for high memory bandwidth interfaces is key to Rambus’ strategic core business. The company has also been collaborating with IBM to research hybrid memory systems, as announced previously.
Rambus collaborated with IBM to research hybrid memory systems. Targeting performance challenges, Rambus Labs and IBM aim to optimize use of DRAM and emerging memories to create a high-capacity memory subsystem that delivers comparable performance to DRAM alone.
As part of the collaboration, Rambus will develop a flexible prototype hybrid memory platform using the OpenCAPI interface to demonstrate performance of multiple memory types in real-world server applications.
Rambus will leverage IBM’s POWER9 processor and its OpenCAPI high performance interface to build a Hybrid Memory and development subsystem prototype. To move forward on this project, Rambus announced it has joined the OpenCAPI Consortium, an open development community based on Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface technology, and OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the IBM Power Architecture.
“Adding these breakthrough innovations from Diablo Technologies will continue to grow Rambus’ leadership in non-volatile and hybrid DRAM and Flash memory technologies with foundational patents,” said Kit Rodgers, SVP of Technology Partnerships and Corporate Development, Rambus. “Diablo Technology’s patented innovations were ahead of their time and nicely complement our offerings for existing and new customers.”
