Ramtron Corp, the Colorado Springs company that started life in Australia, says that the first versions of its unique memory chips – it describes the ferroelectric devices as the world’s first non-volatile dynamic random access memory – are now available. The FMx 1208 ferroelectric RAM combines the read-write performance and unlimited endurance of conventional dynamics with the or ability to retain data without power of magnetic memory. It is a 4K-bit part organised 512 by 8 and is fabricated using a 3.0 micron silicon gate CMOS with integrated ferroelectric storage cells. Ramtron is offering it for low-end microcontroller-based applications and as an engineering evaluation vehicle for the series of higher density products currently under development for introduction later this year. It supports two operating modes, dynamic and nonvolatile, selectable via mode control. In the dynamic mode, it operates as a non-multiplexed dynamic using the high linear dielectric constant of ferroelectric cells to store charge and data must be refreshed. In nonvolatile mode, write operations to all addresses prior to a power loss cause the ferroelectric cells to polarise spontaneously, retaining their data. It uses a +V power supply, dissipates 44mW maximum; access time is 250nS. Evaluation boards for an AT-alike with Intel 8097 backed with 16 FMx 1208s are $5,000.
