It seems that large serial RAM (e.g. 32kBytes RAM) is a product that nobody offers (why?) but many people ask for in forums e.g. read here a similar question: http://wearables.blu.org/wear-hard-02/20028065.html
Maybe the FRAMS (ramtron.com) are a better choice than the Atmel parts; but still overkill. There are many cases we do not need permanent storage, but unlimited read write access. 10^10 read/write cycles for the FRAM's sounds much; but if I write to a single cell at maximum bus speed I only need 3 days to destroy the chip (hope I calculated right :-). Seems to be a market niche nobody has discovered yet. Many small microprocessors today have large Flash (>64kBytes) but often not more than 2kBytes RAM (much RAM makes the chip expensive). But you have serial busses SPI or I2C with up to 1(10)MBit/s -> 100kBytes/s (1MB/s) (with serial auto increment read/write) -> 10(1)us access time - fast enough for many applications. (e.g. data acquisition that needs some scratch ram for the pre-trigger, or you want to draw a graphic for a small dot matrix printer; your application could use a cheap 8 pin processor with 2kFlash but you need 32k RAM). A single SO8 oder SOT23-5 would be much smaller as a big controller with many pins and a parallel SRAM or the PLD/RAM combination suggested here (PLD's are not known to be power saving parts ;-( Conclusions as long as microcontrollers does not come with 64kRAM on chip a serial RAM of this size makes sense. M. -- Author: Matthias Weingart INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
