Memory subsystem
Perhaps the most important part of a computing system is the memory subsystem, where the instructions and data of the processor are stored. The original DragonBall included a System Integration Module (SIM) that allowed it to interface to a variety of memory types, including SRAM, EPROM and FLASH. While this provided a good solution for most applications, battery powered systems (such as the Palm devices) required memory that maintained its contents with minimal power consumption when the unit was in standby mode. Coincidentally, a Palm device spends most of its life in a low power standby mode, even when it's on.

FLASH memory maintains its contents without power, but is rather slow in retrieving and storing data. Since one of the important requirements of the Palm device is immediate responsiveness, engineers at 3Com had to use a type of SRAM called pseudo-static RAM or PSRAM. PSRAM is fast like conventional SRAM, but also has the ability to maintain its data with much lower power consumption than SRAM, thus enabling quick access and storage in a system that can run on a battery.

DragonBall EZ improves on the SIM of the original 68328 (used in ealier Palm devices) by adding a memory controller capable of supporting DRAM. The PC industry has made DRAM a very cheap commodity, as well as driving it to lower power consumption and higher density for portable computers.

DragonBall EZ supports both fast page (FP) and extended data out (EDO) types of DRAM, and has circuitry that supports self-refresh DRAM. This type of DRAM is specialized for low power applications by allowing the DRAM to refresh itself, or restore the values in its cells to prevent data loss. The DRAM controller in DragonBall EZ is tightly coupled with the power management circuitry on the chip to allow the DragonBall EZ processor to supervise the maintenance of the data in the DRAM chips.

The Palm IIIx and Palm V devices utilize the DRAM controller on DragonBall EZ along with the prevalence of low cost, low power DRAM components to provide larger memory spaces with fewer components and lower power consumption.

Enhanced LCD controller
The original DragonBall included a powerful display controller that could display information on a single monochrome or STN (supertwist nematic) LCD panel. It provided a glueless (i.e., direct connection) interface to a wide variety of panels available from manufacturers in the marketplace, such as Motorola, Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba, Epson and many others. The display controller supported up to 4 grey levels (or shades of grey), and it provided an interface where a portion of the main system memory could be used as the display memory. This helped reduce design complexity and system cost by not requiring a separate display buffer, as found in many desktop computers.

DragonBall EZ improves on the LCD controller of the standard DragonBall by allowing supporting up to 640x512 pixels (although current Palm devices are limited to 160x160 pixels), with support for 16 gray levels. This helps increase the quality of the image presented to the user by allowing finer control of the darkness of each pixel. In addition, DragonBall EZ provides a pulse width modulator (PWM) that allows for electronic control of the contrast function on many LCD screens. The Palm V product utilizes this PWM to provide contrast control via an electronic adjustment rather than the manual knob found on previous Palm connected organizers.