15 July 2003 San Jose CA -- Cypress Semiconductor, a leading SRAM supplier, has begun shipping samples of what it calls the world's highest-density synchronous SRAMs.

The 72-Mbit/s, six-transistor devices, supporting standard synchronous and No Bus Latency (NoBL) architectures, are designed for high-data-throughput, low-latency applications, including switching, routing, base stations and data storage.

Antonio Alvarez, senior VP for Cypress's Memory Products Division, said, "We have leapfrogged the competition at 72-Mbit/s, giving our customers the ability to dramatically improve the performance of their networks. The high-density SRAMs are designed into switches and routers, enabling networks, like the Internet, to run more efficiently and with greater capacity."

Available in 42 different configurations, Cypress' CY7C147X- and CY7C148X-series SRAMs deliver data five to seven times faster than competing high-speed DRAMs, the company claims.

Power consumption, speed and manufacturing flexibility have been improved by "innovative design techniques". The devices are pin compatible with lower-density SRAMs, enabling easy migration to higher densities by simplifying designs and saving board space.

The 72-Mbit/s products can be purchased with either pipelined or flowthrough architectures. With the pipelined architecture, they support clock speeds of up to 250-MHz and provide up to 9-Gbit/s bandwidth with one clock cycle of initial latency.

Using advanced frequency detecting circuitry, these devices are able to provide valid data during more than 60% of every clock cycle with a data valid window from 2.4-ns to 4.1-ns, maximising customers' timing budgets.

Products designed with the flowthrough architecture support clock speeds of 133-MHz, providing up to 4.8-Gbit/s of bandwidth with less than one cycle of initial latency. Both pipelined and flowthrough devices are offered in 3.3V and 2.5V BGA, fBGA or TQFP packages, and are available in 4-Mbit x 18, 2-Mbit x 36 or 1-Mbit x 72 configurations.

Cypress's 72-Mbit devices are its first to use its 90-nm RAM9 process technology at its Fab 4 facility in Bloomington, Minn. This technology employs the company's patented fully self-aligned contact and a tungsten stacked gate, which enables high performance transistors that are scalable to future technologies. "This is a major breakthrough for Cypress�s process technology development," said Alvarez.

The CY7C147X- and CY7C148X-series SRAMs are priced at USD95 in 5,000-unit quantities. Full production will commence in Q403.

More information at www.cypress.com