from Hacker News

Ferroelectric RAM

by curtis on 9/1/19, 12:38 AM with 27 comments

  • by leggomylibro on 9/3/19, 12:15 AM

    It's great stuff, but still low capacity and high cost in commercial chips. If you want to play with it, check out TI's MSP430FRxxxx microcontrollers. They have FRAM instead of Flash.

    Also, there are 8-pin FRAM chips with the same pinouts as generic QSPI Flash/RAM/etc chips which you can buy today.

    Again, it's still low-density and expensive, but that seems to be improving and it's fun to make applications which can re-write nonvolatile data by word rather than by page.

  • by evancox100 on 9/3/19, 1:03 AM

    One of the benefits of FRAM is that you can put it through extreme radiation and still have it work afterwards. So you can put it in a medical instrument that undergoes gamma ray sterilization, and it will still not only work but also retain the data.

  • by mark-r on 9/3/19, 12:24 AM

    Not too many days ago someone was complaining about how posts about promising new technology always attracts comments warning that lab results aren't the same as commercial products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753342. I responded that countless times in the past promising technologies had passed by without leaving a mark. Ferroelectric RAM could be the poster child for that effect - it's been around for decades but still hasn't made an impact.

  • by keithnz on 9/3/19, 1:03 AM

    we make a lot of use of FRAM in our embedded systems. It's great stuff. With huge amount of write cycles it simplifies the data structures you need to store compared to page based / lowish write cycle memories.

  • by jhack on 9/3/19, 12:25 AM

    “FeRAM's advantages over Flash include: lower power usage, faster write performance and a much greater maximum read/write endurance (about 10^10 to 10^14 cycles).”

    This sound impressive until you get to the part where reads are destructive, and reads heavily outweigh writes in most workloads. Sounds like a pretty significant disadvantage.

  • by LocalH on 9/3/19, 9:29 AM

    Fun fact: Sonic 3 for Sega Megadrive/Genesis used FeRAM as save RAM. Generally, a Ramtron FM1208S-200CC. I think a few other carts of theirs used it, I've seen 32X Virtua Racing carts with Ramtron FeRAM parts.