Designers of these embedded systems needed a small form factor, extremely rugged DDR3 module. This standard relieves designers from the former limitations of commercial-grade products that required soldering, straps, glue, or tie-downs to secure the module. However, the JEDEC membership initially did not recognize the need to accommodate ECC when it was developing the DDR2 specification on the SODIMM form factor because most laptop chipsets did not support ECC at the time. Seeing the need for ECC that could be implemented on faster DDR2 memory modules in embedded systems, Virtium sponsored the embedded specification within JEDEC, which has been extended now to DDR3 and DDR4 modules.
