The semiconductor industry veteran, who headed up the development of the Opteron chip at Advanced Micro Devices Inc, is getting ready to take the wraps off his 35-person San Jose, California, company that claims to have solved a major bottleneck bedeviling high-powered server computers.

"It means combining lots of things and making those things appear as one thing," Weber said in an interview, explaining the chip his company developed which tricks a server into thinking four standard 1-gigabyte memory chips are actually one monolithic 4 gigabyte chip.

"Think of it as two guys in a horse suit," said Weber, who counts legendary computer hardware designer Andy Bechtolsheim as an early, individual investor in MetaRAM.

As Intel Corp, the world's biggest chipmaker, and AMD, its smaller rival, have moved to making microprocessors with multiple cores -- essentially multiple brains -- to boost performance, a bottleneck of bits in a computer's memory system is slowing things down.

"How the heck am I going to get enough memory to feed all this," Weber said. "The memory roadmap is not going as fast.

For decades, the computing power of semiconductors has doubled roughly every 18 months, a maxim known as Moore's Law in the technology industry and identified in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. But capacity in dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips, doubles only every three years or so.

"We're saying when you want to put more memory in, don't buy big fancy memory chips, buy a whole bunch of commodity DRAM," Weber, 44, said. "Pour hundreds of them into a machine and our one little chip will trick the machine into thinking it's one bigger chip."

Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64, said that, because more data can be loaded into the system memory at once, it speeds up considerably how quickly a processor can crunch a database, by a factor of 10.

"Say you're trying to simulate the next jetliner and you want the whole darn thing to be in memory," Brookwood said. "To do that with current technology is hard and expensive.

"For folks who need lots of memory, this is going to be a godsend," Brookwood said.

MetaRAM's chipset sits between the memory controller and the DRAM and allows four times more run-of-the-mill DRAM chips to be integrated into existing memory modules on the server's motherboard, without the need for any hardware or software changes, Weber said.

MetaRAM's chip, made by contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Amkor Technology Inc, can also cut the cost of a high-performing computer server often used by aerospace, automotive, financial services, and oil and gas exploration companies.

"We use commodity parts, apply them to existing standards, and then you can create simple revolutions," Weber said. "You can make a US$500,000 computer into a US$50,000 computer."

In addition to funding from Bechtolsheim, MetaRAM has a total of US$20 million venture capital funding so far with the backing of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Intel Capital, the VC arm of Intel.