Picked up a handful of new breakouts to try recently, and one was FRAM. I’ve heard of FRAM, but mostly that it’s new and expensive. It is in fact a massive evolution in non-volatile storage.
FRAM (ferroelectric RAM) is a non-volatile memory that combines the speed of SRAM with the persistence of EEPROM. It’s pretty new and much more expensive than EEPROM or flash, but check out these benefits:
- Writes are “instant”, no need to poll until the write is complete
- 10^12 write cycles, 1 million times more than EEPROM
- 200uA operating current vs 1mA for EEPROM
- Page size is the entire chip, no juggling 8, 16 or 64 byte write pages!
Check out the demo here. It is a drop in replacement for older 24Cxxx I2C EEPROMs, but with way fewer caveats and gotchas.