Posts Tagged ‘FRAM’

FRAM in embedded systems

Friday, September 18th, 2009 Nigel Jones

In a previous post I mentioned that I had recently attended a seminar put on by TI. One of the things that was mentioned briefly in the seminar was that TI will soon be releasing members of its popular MSP430 line containing Ferroelectric RAM or FRAM as it is usually referred to. There’s an informative, but poor production quality video on the TI website that describes FRAM’s properties. (To view it, just enter the search term ‘FRAM’ at ti.com. You have to register first, otherwise I’d give you the direct link). Alternatively, Wikipedia has a nice write up as well.

The basic properties of FRAM are quite tantalizing – non-volatile, fast and symmetric read / write times, very low power and essentially immune to light, radiation, magnetic fields etc. Although its speed and density isn’t good enough yet to replace other memory types at the high end, the same is not true for MSP430 class microcontrollers.

From what was said at the seminar it seems likely that TI will soon introduce versions of the MSP430 that contain only FRAM and that you the engineer will be able to partition it as you see fit between code and data storage. Furthermore, the data storage is inherently non-volatile, and so the data storage part can presumably be further divided between scratch storage and configuration parameters.

This is all very interesting, but what are the advantages of FRAM over today’s typical configuration of Flash + SRAM + EEPROM? Well TI has identified what they consider to be several key areas, namely:

  • Data logging applications. They point out (quite correctly) that with FRAM there is no need to worry about wear leveling algorithms, and that data can be stored (written) 1000 times faster than Flash or EEPROM. While this is all true, I’m actually a bit skeptical that this will be a huge game changer. Why? Well if I can write data 1000 times faster, then I’m going to fill the memory 1000 times faster as well. To put it another way, all the data logging systems I’ve ever worked on that use low end processors (such as the MSP430) have data logged no more than about a dozen datums no faster than a couple of times a second. In short, high write speeds aren’t important. However, I do concede that obviating the need for wear leveling algorithms is very nice.
  • High Security applications. One of the fields that I work in is smartcards. Smartcards are used extensively in the fields of access control, conditional access systems for pay TV, smart purses and so on. The key feature of smart cards is their security. One way to attack a smart card is via differential power analysis. The basic idea is that by measuring the cycle by cycle change in the power consumption of the card, it is possible to determine what it’s doing. Given that FRAM essentially consumes the same (and very low) power when it is read and written, it makes it very hard to perform a DPA attack on it. However, for most general purpose applications, this benefit is zero.
  • Low power. For me this is a huge benefit. The ability to write to FRAM at less than 2V will undoubtedly allow me to extend the battery life of some of the systems that I design. Furthermore the amount of energy required to write a byte of FRAM is miniscule compared to Flash or EEPROM. I think TI should be commended for their relentless pursuit of low power in their MSP430 line.
  • Lack of data corruption. Yes folks, believe it or not TI is actually claiming that FRAM eliminates the possibility for data corruption that is associated with other non-volatile memories. Upon hearing this I couldn’t make up my mind whether to blame the marketing department or the hardware guys. Regardless, it’s clearly not true. While I concede that the fast write times significantly reduces the probability of data corruption occurring, it most certainly does not eliminate it. Until the silicon vendors come up with a mechanism for guaranteeing that an arbitrarily sized block of data can be written atomically regardless of what power is doing, then memory will always be prone to corruption.

So do I see any downsides to FRAM usage in microcontrollers? Not really. However I do expect that it will reveal weaknesses in a lot of code (which is of course a good thing). I expect that this will come about because today when a system powers up, the contents of RAM is quasi random. Code that relies on a location not being a certain value on start up thus has a high probability of working. However, with FRAM, that location will contain whatever you last wrote to it – with all that it implies. As a result, I expect people writing for FRAM systems will get religion in a hurry about data initialization. Anyway, once some parts are out, I hope to be able to have a play with them. If I do I’ll undoubtedly write about my experiences.

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