Thanks for the Memory: How MemCon Got Started

It is MemCon on Tuesday. I talked to David Lin to find out how it all started. He was employee #3 at Denali, the first non-engineer. He started as an AE and ended up as VP marketing. Denali was founded in 1995 as a sort of rogue EDA company in a niche that didn't exist at the time. They weren't IP (at first). They were not verification. They provided models to help verify interfaces. Their focus was on models to verify interfaces to external memory. This involved a deep understanding of the specs, getting involved with JEDEC (the standards organization. Don't worry, nobody else can remember what it stands for, either).

When they started, everything was DRAM and NOR Flash. Later NOR Flash became less important and NAND Flash was the only game in town. But there were lots of new interfaces such as DDR, SDRAM, SDR, Rambus, RLDRAM and more. Customers had no idea about them and there was no forum to discuss this. Cisco, in particular, was developing a lot of ASICs and trying to figure out how to get high throughput with low latency. Up until then DRAM had pretty much only been used for PCs, which had different requirements. JEDEC was largely driven by Intel. Networking needed something different. But they were an example of a trend. More and more designers needed to understand memory interfaces and it was not longer just the purchasing agents who needed to get involved with the DRAM companies. The technology started to become really important, not just volumes and dollars. Architects and design managers needed to get involved.

The first thing Denali did was to hire Lane Mason to produce DMR, the Denali Memory Report. This covered industry trends both for Denali internally (what should we develop?) and for the users of memory (what should we use?). For example, due to the volumes of the PC, DRAM was really cheap, but specialty memory for networking was expensive. People needed help deciding which one to use. Lane and the marketing team would talk to ASIC and networking companies on the different technologies, but they would also talk to the memory companies who had a similar problem the other way around. They didn't really know what companies outside the PC industry needed.

Denali decided to open it to a broader audience. So in about 2001 they held the first MemCon with memory vendors, JEDEC and design houses. It was in the Hyatt Hotel with 3-400 people attending. The most popular sessions were technical sessions on how different memory technologies would benefit different markets. They had analysts come with predictions of how the market would evolve over 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. MemCon grew during those days, when there was a sort of Cambrian explosion of different technologies and interfaces. The old interfaces were slow and parallel, the new ones were fast serial synchronous ones that presented both design and test problems. MemCon peaked with 800-1000 people attending with two parallel tracks over two days. There were keynotes from industry experts such as Samsung on the state of the union for Flash, or the chief architect of Cisco talking about future requirements, or equipment vendors like Agilent talking about testing boards and chips with memory interfaces.

The focus moved gradually from DRAM to Flash, specifically NAND Flash, which had its own set of weird requirements and needed a lot more off-chip firmware to handle things like wear leveling (making sure that all the Flash is not unduly written in one place, and thus burned out prematurely) and the fact that data can only be accessed a page at a time. The PC and networking industries were mature and the focus moved to mobile and smartphones with much stricter power requirements.

MemCon started in Silicon Valley and there was one every year. But like a successful rock group, they went on tour too. Japan had one every year. There were occasional ones in Austin and Boston, a couple in Europe.

Denali moved on, too. At first they just had what today we would call VIP, verification IP. Then they moved to real IP, digital controllers for DDR and NAND Flash, and then synthesizable PHYs. They created and promoted the DFI standard (which stands for Digital PHY Standard; yes, they did know PHY starts with a P but it sounds like an F).

Then Cadence acquired Denali. But MemCon lives on and this year, it is Tuesday, October 13, in the Santa Clara Convention Center, which is the day after this blog is published. I'll see you there. To register for MemCon go here.