Huawei mulls over new smart memory

PALO ALTO: Networking companies are working relentlessly to bring out a new generation of smart memories. Once these are on the market, they will aid in speeding up packet processing and will create smaller, faster line cards for network routers and switches. The industry buzz is that big system makers are working separately on competitive implementations which could someday be used broadly in their products.

Huawei Technologies has revealed their work on a first-generation smart memory that will pack 32 Mbytes of IBM embedded DRAM on a 45nm chip consuming 60W. It will include an array of packet processing elements to drive data rates at rates up to 100 Gbits/second and get a minimum of 250 million memory accesses per second.

The device is in a verification phase and still needs some external DDR3 DRAM. Huawei intends to start work in a few months on a follow-on chip that could pack as much as 128 Mbytes eDRAM say sources at the company. The long term goal is to replace all their memory using smart memory, revealed sources, who were speaking at Hot Chips.

These smart memory chips could eliminate TCAMs and three of four network processors that are used on network line cards today and also replace large banks of standard DRAMs. The smart memory chips will be attempting to speed up as many as 16 different packet processing jobs that require a little bit of processing on great gobs of memory. Thus the first Huawei uses an array of memories linked to small packet processing blocks that include logic to handle atomic locking operations