Director, Partner, Senior Engineer. SADRAM, Inc. US.
“SADRAM and its implementation“
Tuesday 17 February 2026
Abstract
Symbolically Addressed DRAM, or SADRAM, is an augmentation of DDR memory in which data can be addressed via any arbitrary symbol, instead of solely by the physical address at which it is stored. When a new record is written to SADRAM, the record’s indexing key is extracted, sorted, and stored hierarchically by augmented row buffer logic within one of the DRAM chips. This provides database-like access to memory, freeing the main processor to offload pointer arithmetic and data organisation tasks associated with sorting data, and also makes novel storage methods possible (such as compact storage of sparsely populated arrays). For algorithms modified to take advantage of SADRAM, we expect to achieve 1) increased performance via memory-wall circumvention, and 2) reduced energy consumption from a reduction in the amount of data having to travel from CPU to DDR.
We are actively prototyping the SADRAM concept using the AMD Alveo v80 FPGA card, equipped with HBM memory, to simulate a typical 8192-bit wide access to a DRAM’s cell array by its row buffer. The SADRAM algorithm is similar to B-Trees, featuring a very wide ‘node’ fanout of 128 for a x16 DRAM chip and 32-bit key. SADRAM logic compares all nodes in the row buffer against new data simultaneously; thus, there is no performance tradeoff for the very wide fanout, in contrast to a similarly wide processor implementation.
While the primary application for SADRAM is sorting and storage-by-symbol, it features a general purpose processor, opening the door for the implementation of other algorithms. We invite the Multicore World global community to provide feedback on applications and explore together further developments to be incorporated into our five-year roadmap.
Bio
Jason Trout is an experienced embedded developer in his own right, with 15+ years experience at Raytheon and other small engineering firms, in a Senior Engineer and Team Lead role. However, almost all of his career, he’s served as apprentice and technical consult to the late Robert Trout, a serial entrepreneur with 2 successful startup businesses (Anzus Inc, Pico Computing, sold to Rockwell Collins and Micron, respectively). Their collaboration is the spark behind SADRAM, Robert’s last startup.
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