Four new Serial SRAM devices have been released by Microchip that features one of the industry’s largest densities and speeds. They are enhanced with 5V 
operation, which is used extensively in automotive and industrial applications. These 512Kb and 1Mb SPI devices offer low power consumption and a small, 8-pin package. Speeds of up to 80Mbps are achieved via the quad-SPI, or SQI, protocol, providing the zero write-cycle times with near instantaneous data movement needed for offloading graphics, data buffering, data logging, displays, maths, audio, video and other data-intensive functions.
Two additional family members, the 23LCV512 and 23LCV1024, are a cost-effective option for non-volatile, unlimited-endurance RAM, via battery backup. They have a fast dual-SPI (SDI) throughput of 40Mbps and low active and sleep currents. Alos of interest is that these serial NVSRAM devices feature high-speed operation without the high pin counts of parallel NVSRAM, and power consumption comparable to FRAM, at a fraction of the price. This is beneficial for applications such as meters, black boxes and other data recorders, which require unlimited endurance or instantaneous writes in addition to non-volatile storage.
The new 1Mbit SRAMs enable designers of embedded products to provide more RAM at a much lower cost than moving to a larger microcontroller or processor; and with lower power consumption, pin counts and cost than parallel SRAM. The integration of a SPI enables these SRAM to support the trend towards serial interfaces. The EEPROM market has completely moved to serial interfaces, whilst the Flash market is rapidly making this transition, due to the higher cost, board space and power consumption of parallel devices.
All six devices from the new serial SRAM family are available in 8-pin SOIC, TSSOP and PDIP packages, with density options of 512 Kbits and 1Mbit.
Microchip
