Qimonda AG, a leading supplier of memory products, today announced that it has begun to ship samples of its first 512Mb XDR DRAM. The XDR memory solution extends the Qimonda graphics RAM portfolio to better serve high-performance and high-bandwidth applications for the fast growing global computing and consumer electronics markets.

"We are proud to deliver the first XDR samples less than one year after signing the technology license agreement with Rambus. XDR DRAM is a considerable value extension to the Qimonda high performance DRAM portfolio and opens new opportunities in various applications," said Robert Feurle, Vice President of Business Unit Graphics at Qimonda.

"We are excited to have reached this milestone with Qimonda as they actively bring the advanced XDR memory solution to market," said Sharon Holt, senior vice president of Worldwide Sales, Licensing and Marketing at Rambus. "The close collaboration between our engineering teams enables a stable XDR DRAM supply base as an increasing number of consumer and digital entertainment applications require higher performance memory solutions."

The Rambus XDR memory interface solution satisfies the needs of many demanding applications, including game consoles, digital TVs and front projection systems. With the flexibility to provide orders of magnitude more bandwidth than competing technologies, XDR interfaces can also reduce overall systems costs for consumer products sensitive to total component count. Gartner projects a market of 44 million game consoles in 2008, whereas the digital TV market is estimated for 113 million TV sets in 2008 from iSuppli. Also, ABI Research expects front projection systems to reach 5 million units in 2008.

For more information about the Rambus XDR memory architecture consisting of the XDR DRAM device, the XCG (XDR Clock Generator), the XIO controller interface cell, and the XDR memory controller (XMC), please visit www.rambus.com/xdr.