Date: 26th May 2011
Ramtron starts shipping IBM made FRAM
chips
Ramtron International Corporation has announced the broad
sampling of the first pre-qualification ferroelectric random
access memory (F-RAM) devices built on the company's new
manufacturing line at IBM Corporation. The FM24C04C and
FM24C16C are serial 5-volt devices with 4- and 16-kilobits
of F-RAM memory, respectively.
"Releasing samples of the FM24C04C and FM24C16C devices
is a significant milestone in our new foundry program,"
said Eric Balzer, Ramtron's CEO. "These pre-qualification
devices, which meet all datasheet specifications and our
stringent quality standards, are available now for customer
evaluation. Additional devices, including 3-volt I2C and
3- and 5-volt SPI products, will become available for sampling
as testing is completed."
The FM24C04C and FM24C16C feature a serial I2C interface,
have an active current of 100µA (typical at 100kHz)
and perform up to 1MHz bus frequency. The devices are direct
drop-in replacements for 4- and 16-Kb serial EEPROM memories
used in industrial controls, metering, medical, military,
gaming, and computing applications, among others. The FM24C04C
and FM24C16C are offered in an industry standard 8-pin SOIC
package and operate over the industrial temperature range
of -40°C to +85°C.
Ramtron's FM24CxxC products offer single-byte writes that
are 200 times faster than those of EEPROM. In addition,
the devices offer no timing delays and can be written to
at standard bus speeds as compared to EEPROM, which requires
a 5- to 10-millisecond write delay before new data can be
registered. The FM24C04C and FM24C16C feature 1-trillion
write cycles, compared to 1-million write cycles for EEPROM,
and have an extremely low operating current compared to
competing nonvolatile memory products.
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