Rambus: A Puzzle to Solve

Anyone who has spent any time with Mark knows that he loves puzzles. His office at Stanford is full of puzzles: some he built himself, some crafted from beautiful hardwood, and some simple children's toys. Each of them has their own aesthetic and their unique attraction to Mark. So, in many ways, it's no surprise that what attracted him to cofounding Rambus back in 1990 was a puzzle posed by Rambus cofounder Mike Farmwald: could they, using circuit and architecture techniques, increase the bandwidth of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) interface tenfold without changing process technology?