Why Go Serial?

Mobile device manufacturers are constantly being asked to do more with less. More features, more performance, and longer battery life with less size, weight, and cost. Existing technology limitations are forcing manufacturers to make tough choices about what features to include and leave out and how best to balance performance and battery life against intense cost pressures. As current parallel memory technology becomes more cumbersome, those choices become more difficult while the market consequences of choosing the wrong features become more drastic.

The parallel interface used by currently available memories requires a high pin count to achieve the minimum acceptable performance level for today’s mobile device functionality. The inherent limitations of parallel interfaces have already resulted in many data transfer functions abandoning them for faster serial interfaces, including:

• Parallel ATA is becoming Serial ATA (SATA) at 1.5 Gbit, 3Gbit, and 6Gbit per second.
• PCI is becoming PCI Express at 2.5 Gbit, 5 Gbit and 8 Gbit per second.
• Parallel I/O ports have given way to the Universal Serial Bus (USB) at 480 Mbit per second going to 4.8 Gbit per second.
• DDR2 is being replaced by Advanced Memory Buffer (AMB) at 4.8 Gbit per second.
• Cellular telephones are migrating to the new Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI).

Serial interfaces are the wave of the future… and Serial Port Memory Technology (SPMT™) is poised to be superior to parallel memory’s cost, power, and performance barriers by increasing mobile functionality and simplifying mobile device design and manufacture.