Memory Types

One of the most important concept in every computing system, the Memory.
Today in Personal Computers there is plenty of memory space whereas the embedded systems still lack enough memory space. Power consumption, memory and disk space, size are the limitations of the embedded systems. For that reason, programming accordingly is crucial for the system.
We are not in the era when 64KB memory was a great success. The size of memory goes up to GigaBytes but still there are important issues in memory design and use.types of memory? Which one is the best fit for your system?? To be able to answer this question, you need to know the types, the volatility, addressing, write-ability issues in a memory chip. Today I will discuss about the memory types existing in embedded systems.
RAM and ROM are the basic types however there are hybrid types as well. RAM memories are volatile chips, which means if the power is off, you lose all the data in that location. If you are using a SRAM, which is a static RAM and mostly used as CPU cache, you can keep the data there as log you supply with the power. But if you are using a DRAM, the data is refreshed periodically and you cant keep the data forever. A DRAM is nothing if you do not have a DRAM controller for it. That is why a memory controller is important in the proper functioning of a DRAM. Unlike RAMs, ROMs are stable memory devices. Even if the power is off, the data still remains in the memory chip. But once the data is written there, you cant easily erase or re-write the data. To overcome the difficulties of ROM and RAM type memories, the hardware engineers developed hybrid types of memory, which are re-writable but non-volatile. The most common ones are NVRAM and Flash memories. I have never used a NVRAM but I am currently programming a data flash to store some temperature data I read in my room. As I make progress in this project, I will keep you updated with this blog as well :-) This is just a very basic information about memories currently used.
Have a GREAT Sunday!
And yes, I didnt forget to write about Makefiles...