The Past: Fragmented Memory Architectures

For decades, compute systems have been built on a fragmented memory model:

— DRAM for speed—fast but volatile.

— Flash or SSDs for persistence and density—slower but non-volatile.

This division, combined with increased demand of memory, created what is known as the memory wall:

— Performance bottlenecks

— Power inefficiencies

— Increased system complexity

While power constraints have often been seen as the limiting factor, there is a deeper issue: managing two
fundamentally different types of memory adds overhead and slows down performance. This fragmentation
makes scaling modern systems increasingly difficult.

The Present: Memory as a Bottleneck

Today, the explosion of AI workloads in automotive, space, IoT, and datacenter environments has turned the memory wall into a hard performance ceiling. Architectures designed years ago are now being asked to handle:

— Massive datasets

— Large AI models

— Real-time decision-making

Traditional solutions—DRAM for speed and Flash for persistence—force trade-offs that modern systems can no longer accept.

The Future: DRAM+ and CACHE+ Collapse the Hierarchy

DRAM+ and CACHE+ fundamentally change the equation.
These innovations collapse the traditional memory hierarchy, combining:

— High speed

— Non-volatility

into a single solution.

This eliminates the need to juggle between volatile and persistent memory tiers. The result? Up to 10x improvements in system performance, simply by removing the inefficiencies of traditional architectures.

Industry Impact

Across industries, these advances are transformative:

— Automotive: Instant-on and real-time safety-critical processing

— Space: Ultra-reliable, low-power systems

— IoT: Low-power devices with fast memory

— Datacenters: Massive AI workloads with reduced complexity and cost

Rethinking Memory

The memory wall is no longer just a matter of power; it’s about architecture, complexity, and readiness for a data-driven future. With DRAM+ and CACHE+, FMC is enabling a new class of systems. So the key question is no longer “Where can we use these technologies?”

It’s: Where can we afford not to?