Micron Technology, Inc., (Nasdaq:MU) announced today that its Hybrid Memory Cube was named the Memory Product of the Year by a panel of industry experts.

The award was announced this week at the EE Times and EDN ACE Awards Event at Design West, the annual technical conference for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs and technology professionals. This year's awards mark a critical juncture in the industry, as system designers across a broad range of applications look for new memory system designs that will support increased demands for bandwidth, density and power efficiency. Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) has been recognized by industry leaders and influencers as the long-awaited answer to the growing gap between the performance improvement rate of DRAM versus processor data consumption rate — a dilemma known as the "memory wall."

"Electronic Design News and EE Times are two of the industry's most influential and well-read publications by design engineers and system architects," said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron's DRAM solutions group. "We are honored that they share our vision for the unprecedented impact and value that Hybrid Memory Cube brings to the electronics industry."

An industry breakthrough, HMC uses advanced through-silicon vias (TSVs) — vertical conduits that electrically connect a stack of individual chips — to combine high-performance logic with Micron's state-of-the-art DRAM chips. HMC delivers bandwidth and efficiencies a leap beyond current device capabilities, blasting data 15 times faster than a DDR3 module and using 70 percent less energy and 90 percent less space than existing technologies. Micron expects to ship the first engineering samples of this revolutionary technology later this year.