According to the QDR Consortium — which includes influential memory suppliers Cypress Semiconductor Corp., Integrated Device Technology Inc., NEC Electronics Corp., Renesas Technology Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. — the new products will operate at speeds up to 500 megahertz, up to 50 times faster than existing QDRII and DDRII products. The standard has been developed for network switches, routers and other communications applications, the consortium said.

QDRII+ and DDRII+ products will deliver a higher bandwidth than their predecessors — up to 72 gigabits per second — while using the same footprint and a 165-pin, FBGA package, according to the consortium.

"The QDRII+ architecture leverages existing infrastructures to create higher performing products that meet changing customer bandwidth requirements," said Brian Metelak, SRAM marketing manager for Cypress, in a statement. "It is an evolutionary architecture that allows direct transitions to higher frequencies."

The consortium said the QDR and DDR families of SRAM will provide designers with a complete memory solution for almost any network application. QDRII+ devices will have two ports operating independently at twice the selected clock rate, allowing a transfer of four data words in a single clock cycle, the consortium said, while the DDRII+ devices will allow double data rate transfers over a common I/O data bus.

Consortium members expect to have QDRII+ and DDRII+ samples available in the second quarter. The consortium said that specifications for QDRII+ and DDRII+ SRAMs would be publicly available on the QDR SRAM Web site in the near future.