new perspectives : ramtron’s low power FRAM
Technology development can take place on many different scales ranging from basement based bucket chemistry to large corporate discovery-development programs. Whatever the scale work in a new area may bring about advances to existing areas of technology because of a new perspective. Ramtron’s low power FRAM part announced this week seems to stem from a […]
Technology development can take place on many different scales ranging from basement based bucket chemistry to large corporate discovery-development programs. Whatever the scale work in a new area may bring about advances to existing areas of technology because of a new perspective. Ramtron’s low power FRAM part announced this week seems to stem from a new perspective.
Ramtron has been working on RFID based products implementing FRAM for a number of years now. It was during this time that presentations and or conference calls started making reference to a lower power FRAM that was emerging from the work in RFID. It was further mentioned these developments could be applied to non-RFID devices. The technical details were however understandably scarce.
So what are the details?
As a very general statement any developments in semiconductors can be attributed to either process/ structure or circuit design. The same might be anticipated for FRAM. In this week’s Press Release Ramtron indicated “The fast write ability of nonvolatile FRAM combined with an innovative IC design has enabled us to achieve the lowest energy consumption …”. Thus, it sounds this development is probably largely associated with circuit design. Use of the word “innovative” supports the notion that we should see the details in patent documents.
Somewhat coincidentally, four patent applications assigned to Ramtron, relating to the use of FRAM in an RFID system were recently published by the USPTO. It has been a while since we have seen any patent filings from Ramtron, so it will be interesting to dig into these and, for sure, forth coming publications to generally gain insights into their RFID efforts and specifically the circuit designs behind their advances in low power.