Rambus announced recently its customers have shipped more than 500 million 128Mb equivalent memory devices incorporating the Rambus RDRAM memory interface. The company believes that its memory powers more than 100 million of different products that have been shipped in the course of the previous 8 years since the RDRAM was ontroduced.

“This milestone confirms the competitive advantage our customers derive from the exceptional system performance provided by Rambus memory interface solutions," said Laura Stark, vice president of Platform Solutions at Rambus.

RDRAM memory devices can be found in over 100 million consumer, computing and communications systems and products shipped since the introduction of RDRAM in 1997 and are currently shipping in applications ranging from game consoles and high definition televisions to Internet routers and even personal computers.

Rambus has licensed its RDRAM and XDR memory interfaces to some of the world's largest chip and system providers. Samsung recently announced it is entering into volume production of XDR DRAM to support multimedia applications. In addition to Samsung, Elpida and Toshiba have licensed the XDR memory interface for incorporation into DRAMs, and Panasonic has licensed the XDR memory interface for use with future consumer electronics controller chips.

“The success our customers have enjoyed with RDRAM makes for a natural transition to our newest XDR memory interface solution,” Ms Stark added.

Earlier this year, Sony, Toshiba and IBM revealed that the much-anticipated Cell processor that will power the PlayStation 3 console will incorporate the XDR memory interface. XDR memory, along with Rambus’s FlexIO processor bus solution, provides the Cell processor with approximately 100GB/s of aggregate bandwidth, bringing unprecedented I/O performance to the most demanding of applications.