Borea launches design-around service for the memory shortage
Borea has opened a new engineering service aimed squarely at the DRAM crisis: redesigning embedded systems onto NXP silicon that customers can actually buy.
The memory market has stopped behaving like a market. Data centre demand has absorbed the bulk of global DRAM output, and equipment makers outside the AI supply chain are being told what they will get rather than ordering what they need. Some OEMs report receiving only half to two-thirds of the volumes they ordered, and SK Hynix has warned the crunch may run past 2030. For an industrial or communications product with a fifteen-year field life, waiting is not a plan.
Borea’s answer draws on the full span of NXP silicon, from PowerQUICC I through QorIQ and Layerscape to the newest i.MX 9 devices. For many products the fastest route back into production is a step backwards — onto a proven older SoC using DDR3, DDR2 or SDRAM in the modest densities that remain sourceable, or that customers already hold in stock. For others it is a step forward, onto an i.MX 9 device that needs a single small LPDDR4 part instead of a high-density array.
What makes the backward step viable is microcode. “When you move to older silicon, the functions that were added in hardware appear to be gone,” says Matevž Langus at Borea. “Usually they are not gone — they were simply moved into silicon later. We can put them back as firmware, in the QUICC Engine, the FMan or the AIOP. The customer loses the memory dependency and keeps the capability.”
The service also addresses a structural problem the shortage has exposed. Products built on third-party CPU modules cannot substitute a memory device, change density or move to an adjacent processor, because the design belongs to the module vendor. Borea’s customers own their designs outright — hardware, software and design data — which is what makes a rapid design-around possible at all.
Borea is an NXP Approved Engineering Consultant and has held NXP microcode development access for QUICC Engine and eRISC/AIOP since 2013.