Geof25 23 hours ago

You can buy FRAM (Ferroelectric RAM) which are effectively the same thing just in smaller package. But I have seen them only about few kB. However the amount of R/W operations is effectively unlimited,

  • Neywiny 22 hours ago

    You can get them up to 16Mb/2MB. Which is 1/128 what NOR flash comes in for a similar price and package. Certainly a trade.

    I think MRAM is the future though.

    • Joker_vD 22 hours ago

      It is the future, and has been the future for almost 40 years already! I bet that's what the hoverboards will use inside their microcontrollers — gotta drive those portable fusion reactors reliably!

      • kjs3 22 hours ago

        I though bubble memory was the future. Dammit, I missed another memo.

    • dlcarrier 22 hours ago

      Phase-change memory is the most advanced high-endurance nvram, with Intel and Micron's XPoint being the most advanced to have hit production. If it had stuck around long enough for the RAMpocalypse, they'd probably sell out their production capacity.

    • christkv 14 hours ago

      Only if Flash stagnates as a technology. I suspect it will in the next 5 years due to reliability but you never know.

  • trollbridge 22 hours ago

    Yes, although (like some flash technology) read cycles are slower than write cycles, and it takes longer to read a 0 bit and than 1 bit (or vice versa).

  • mrheosuper 14 hours ago

    One of our product use msp430 FRAM version to store the motor position, due to high sampling rate, if we use flash we would burn through flash in no time. The FRAM is really neat.

amelius 1 day ago

With the current DRAM shortages, this couldn't have come at a better time.

kristopolous 23 hours ago

I thought they meant bus width ...still impressed for entirely unexpected reasons.

JKCalhoun 21 hours ago

Core64 has been selling a kit like this for some time:

https://www.core64.io/buy

(I chatted with them at the VCFMW, Vintage Computer Festival Mid-Waste, and they are very cool.)

kjs3 22 hours ago

Dataram, back in the day, made 'generic' core memory planes. That is, the had a relatively speaking simple electrical interface, and many vendors just implemented whatever was needed to hook it up to the vendors (usually) proprietary interface.

I have a couple I've been (very) slowly trying to get working with a modern-ish microcontroller with USB connectivity.

cadr 22 hours ago

I have a little envelope of cores that I’ve been meaning to do something with for years, but they are just so tiny I haven’t wanted to mess with them. (Not sure when they were made, but I’m assuming fairly late based on the size.)

andai 21 hours ago

Neat! My Japanese is a bit rusty, how much memory is this?

Wait, is each of the rings one bit?

  • deathanatos 19 hours ago

    > Neat! My Japanese is a bit rusty, how much memory is this?

    The smaller one is 16 bit. The larger one is 128 bytes, or 1024 bit. The PCB is labelled in English. ;) (pause at 49s)

    (There are also subtitles in English, though, yes, those could be inaccurate.)

    > Wait, is each of the rings one bit?

    Yes. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory>