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Auto Grade FM25V10
The automotive industry is very conservative. New products or ideas are adopted only after their quality and integrity have been proven. Things change relatively slowly.
A short time ago Ramtron made a small change. We adopted a policy of qualifying all new products to AEC Q100 standards rather than wait for a customer to request the qualification. The first product resulting from this policy is the FM25V(N)10. The FM25V(N)10 is a 1Mbit SPI F-RAM with a few new features that might be interesting to automotive engineers.
The V family is characterised by a lower Vdd, operating from 2V to 3.6V. Almost all new automotive designs are 3V nowadays. Many FPGAs, Micros and ASICs are capable of lower operating voltages so the V family offers a memory that supports these designs.
The serial number feature of the new FM25V(N)10 is optional. It can be customised so that only a certain range of numbers are sold to one customer. This simple feature allows the software to ensure that the product is not a clone. It also has another benefit. It is guaranteed to be unique so every system made will have a different number. This could be useful as a MAC address, IP address or a similar number that uniquely identifies a product on a network.
The FM25V(N)10 has a fast SPI at 40MHz. Using F-RAM’s ability to write as fast as data is delivered over a serial bus allows the entire 1Mbit to be written in about 27mS. This is less time than it would take to write three pages of data to an EEPROM or Flash memory.
The serial memory used in automotive applications have been slowly moving towards higher density and lower Vdd. Ramtron’s change in qualification policy may have been small but it means that automotive engineers now have a nonvolatile serial memory solution ready and waiting for them as their demands materialise rather than having to request it and wait.
F-RAM Products | Duncan Bennett | 
October 7, 2010 3:12 pm
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