What’s the value of development time?
One of the features of F-RAM is very high endurance. It’s so high in fact that you can write as many times you like if you are using an F-RAM device over a serial bus. Simply put, serial busses are not fast enough to ever reach the endurance limit of F-RAM. This allows engineers to re-think their non-volatile memory strategy and entirely eliminate routines that perform wear-leveling and data saves on power fail.
Wear-leveling is commonly used for Flash or EEPROM parts to ensure that the application does not exceed their typical 1-million write cycle specification. With F-RAM’s 100 trillion cycles, in real world applications, you will never reach the endurance limit.
| If (Saving_Data_on_Power_Fail) = Difficult Then Call Save_Data_Whenever_it_Changes_Instead(VirtuallyUnlimitedEndurance); Endif; |
There is another way that F-RAM’s high endurance can save development effort. A lot of systems need to save data upon power failure. This requires extra hardware to perform an early detection of the power fail as well as some software to control the reaction. The power fail software needs to be written and tested, both of which require engineering time. At this point I should throw in lots of warnings about slow power ramps with noise and power glitches that cause problematic detection of a power fail. The faster you save the data the better!
Saving the time and effort to write and test software for wear leveling and data saves on power fail is valuable. A customer recently said that removing both of these tasks from his schedule would save him three months. How much money could you save if you eliminated several months of development time? Generally speaking, I don’t have a precise answer, so here is my challenge. If you are an engineer, go and ask your boss how much extra your company can add to the BOM cost for ABC if it saves you X person-months of development effort!
F-RAM Design Hints | admin | 
January 5, 2010 1:01 am
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