#SRAM programming

[jnth2erie]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--nvram--quantum-trap-nvsram/m95m02-drmn6tp-stmicroelectronics-8011669

Static ram manufacturers, Battery backed Static RAM, SRAM memory card

M95M02 Series 2 Mb (256 K x 8) 5.5 V Serial SPI Bus EEPROM - SOIC-8

[sull2chett]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--nvram--quantum-trap-nvsram/m95m02-drmn6tp-stmicroelectronics-7140290

SRAM chip, SRAM memory card, SRAM memory chips, static random access memory

M95M02 Series 2 Mb (256 K x 8) 5.5 V Serial SPI Bus EEPROM - SOIC-8

[mosh2viss]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--static-ram--asynchronous/cy62157ev18ll-55bvxi-infineon-3728565

SRAM memory cell, Types of SRAM, data Memory, memory card reader

CY62157EV18 Series 8 Mb (512 K x 16) 1.65 - 2.25 V 55 ns Static RAM - VFBGA-48

[abr2tello]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--static-ram--asynchronous/cy62167ev30ll-45bvxi-infineon-6042923

Non-Volatile SRAM memory, Non-Volatile SRAM, Non volatile memory

CY62167EV30 Series 16 Mb (1M x 16/2M x 8) 2.2 - 3.6 V 45 ns Static RAM -TSOP-48

[bbob2reaa]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--static-ram--asynchronous/cy62167ev30ll-45bvxit-infineon-1068579

Non Volatile SRAM memory, What is SRAM, SRAM manufacturers, SRAM chip

CY62167EV30 Series 16 Mb (1M x 16 / 2 M x 8) 3 V 45 ns Static RAM - FBGA-48

[michl2ximm]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--nvram--quantum-trap-nvsram/m95m02-drmn6tp-stmicroelectronics-3034532

Non-volatile memory, SRAM data, SRAM chip programming, Non volatile memory

M95M02 Series 2 Mb (256 K x 8) 5.5 V Serial SPI Bus EEPROM - SOIC-8

[miche2lym]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--nvram--quantum-trap-nvsram/m95m02-drmn6tp-stmicroelectronics-3034532

EPROM, FIFO's, Flash Memory, what is SRAM, Static RAM, SRAM transmission

M95M02 Series 2 Mb (256 K x 8) 5.5 V Serial SPI Bus EEPROM - SOIC-8

[clitn2hop]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--memory--RAM--nvram--quantum-trap-nvsram/mx29f040cqi-70g-macronix-6159320

Static random access memory, types of volatile memory, sram programming

MX29F Series 4-Mbit (512 K x 8) 70 ns 5 V Surface Mount Flash Memory - PLCC-32

[michl2rois]

Random Access Memory, Static ram, SRAM memory, SRAM memories

MX29F Series 4-Mbit (512 K x 8) 70 ns 5 V Surface Mount Flash Memory - PLCC-32

[andmaybegayer]

What are some of the coolest computer chips ever, in your opinion?

Hmm. There are a lot of chips, and a lot of different things you could call a Computer Chip. Here's a few that come to mind as "interesting" or "important", or, if I can figure out what that means, "cool".

If your favourite chip is not on here honestly it probably deserves to be and I either forgot or I classified it more under "general IC's" instead of "computer chips" (e.g. 555, LM, 4000, 7000 series chips, those last three each capable of filling a book on their own). The 6502 is not here because I do not know much about the 6502, I was neither an Apple nor a BBC Micro type of kid. I am also not 70 years old so as much as I love the DEC Alphas, I have never so much as breathed on one.

Disclaimer for writing this mostly out of my head and/or ass at one in the morning, do not use any of this as a source in an argument without checking.

Intel 3101

So I mean, obvious shout, the Intel 3101, a 64-bit chip from 1969, and Intel's first ever product. You may look at that, and go, "wow, 64-bit computing in 1969? That's really early" and I will laugh heartily and say no, that's not 64-bit computing, that is 64 bits of SRAM memory.

This one is cool because it's cute. Look at that. This thing was completely hand-designed by engineers drawing the shapes of transistor gates on sheets of overhead transparency and exposing pieces of crudely spun silicon to light in a """"cleanroom"""" that would cause most modern fab equipment to swoon like a delicate Victorian lady. Semiconductor manufacturing was maturing at this point but a fab still had more in common with a darkroom for film development than with the mega expensive building sized machines we use today.

As that link above notes, these things were really rough and tumble, and designs were being updated on the scale of weeks as Intel learned, well, how to make chips at an industrial scale. They weren't the first company to do this, in the 60's you could run a chip fab out of a sufficiently well sealed garage, but they were busy building the background that would lead to the next sixty years.

Lisp Chips

This is a family of utterly bullshit prototype processors that failed to be born in the whirlwind days of AI research in the 70's and 80's.

Lisps, a very old but exceedingly clever family of functional programming languages, were the language of choice for AI research at the time. Lisp compilers and interpreters had all sorts of tricks for compiling Lisp down to instructions, and also the hardware was frequently being built by the AI researchers themselves with explicit aims to run Lisp better.

The illogical conclusion of this was attempts to implement Lisp right in silicon, no translation layer.

Yeah, that is Sussman himself on this paper.

These never left labs, there have since been dozens of abortive attempts to make Lisp Chips happen because the idea is so extremely attractive to a certain kind of programmer, the most recent big one being a pile of weird designd aimed to run OpenGenera. I bet you there are no less than four members of r/lisp who have bought an Icestick FPGA in the past year with the explicit goal of writing their own Lisp Chip. It will fail, because this is a terrible idea, but damn if it isn't cool.

There were many more chips that bridged this gap, stuff designed by or for Symbolics (like the Ivory series of chips or the 3600) to go into their Lisp machines that exploited the up and coming fields of microcode optimization to improve Lisp performance, but sadly there are no known working true Lisp Chips in the wild.

Zilog Z80

Perhaps the most important chip that ever just kinda hung out. The Z80 was almost, almost the basis of The Future. The Z80 is bizzare. It is a software compatible clone of the Intel 8080, which is to say that it has the same instructions implemented in a completely different way.

This is, a strange choice, but it was the right one somehow because through the 80's and 90's practically every single piece of technology made in Japan contained at least one, maybe two Z80's even if there was no readily apparent reason why it should have one (or two). I will defer to Cathode Ray Dude here: What follows is a joke, but only barely

The Z80 is the basis of the MSX, the IBM PC of Japan, which was produced through a system of hardware and software licensing to third party manufacturers by Microsoft of Japan which was exactly as confusing as it sounds. The result is that the Z80, originally intended for embedded applications, ended up forming the basis of an entire alternate branch of the PC family tree.

It is important to note that the Z80 is boring. It is a normal-ass chip but it just so happens that it ended up being the focal point of like a dozen different industries all looking for a cheap, easy to program chip they could shove into Appliances.

Effectively everything that happened to the Intel 8080 happened to the Z80 and then some. Black market clones, reverse engineered Soviet compatibles, licensed second party manufacturers, hundreds of semi-compatible bastard half-sisters made by anyone with a fab, used in everything from toys to industrial machinery, still persisting to this day as an embedded processor that is probably powering something near you quietly and without much fuss. If you have one of those old TI-86 calculators, that's a Z80. Oh also a horrible hybrid Z80/8080 from Sharp powered the original Game Boy.

I was going to try and find a picture of a Z80 by just searching for it and look at this mess! There's so many of these things.

I mean the C/PM computers. The ZX Spectrum, I almost forgot that one! I can keep making this list go! So many bits of the Tech Explosion of the 80's and 90's are powered by the Z80. I was not joking when I said that you sometimes found more than one Z80 in a single computer because you might use one Z80 to run the computer and another Z80 to run a specialty peripheral like a video toaster or music synthesizer. Everyone imaginable has had their hand on the Z80 ball at some point in time or another. Z80 based devices probably launched several dozen hardware companies that persist to this day and I have no idea which ones because there were so goddamn many.

The Z80 eventually got super efficient due to process shrinks so it turns up in weird laptops and handhelds! Zilog and the Z80 persist to this day like some kind of crocodile beast, you can go to RS components and buy a brand new piece of Z80 silicon clocked at 20MHz. There's probably a couple in a car somewhere near you.

Pentium (P6 microarchitecture)

Yeah I am going to bring up the Hackers chip. The Pentium P6 series is currently remembered for being the chip that Acidburn geeks out over in Hackers (1995) instead of making out with her boyfriend, but it is actually noteworthy IMO for being one of the first mainstream chips to start pulling serious tricks on the system running it.

The P6 microarchitecture comes out swinging with like four or five tricks to get around the numerous problems with x86 and deploys them all at once. It has superscalar pipelining, it has a RISC microcode, it has branch prediction, it has a bunch of zany mathematical optimizations, none of these are new per se but this is the first time you're really seeing them all at once on a chip that was going into PC's.

Without these improvements it's possible Intel would have been beaten out by one of its competitors, maybe Power or SPARC or whatever you call the thing that runs on the Motorola 68k. Hell even MIPS could have beaten the ageing cancerous mistake that was x86. But by discovering the power of lying to the computer, Intel managed to speed up x86 by implementing it in a sensible instruction set in the background, allowing them to do all the same clever pipelining and optimization that was happening with RISC without having to give up their stranglehold on the desktop market. Without the P5 we live in a very, very different world from a computer hardware perspective.

From this falls many of the bizzare microcode execution bugs that plague modern computers, because when you're doing your optimization on the fly in chip with a second, smaller unix hidden inside your processor eventually you're not going to be cryptographically secure.

RISC is very clearly better for, most things. You can find papers stating this as far back as the 70's, when they start doing pipelining for the first time and are like "you know pipelining is a lot easier if you have a few small instructions instead of ten thousand massive ones.

x86 only persists to this day because Intel cemented their lead and they happened to use x86. True RISC cuts out the middleman of hyperoptimizing microcode on the chip, but if you can't do that because you've girlbossed too close to the sun as Intel had in the late 80's you have to do something.

The Future

This gets us to like the year 2000. I have more chips I find interesting or cool, although from here it's mostly microcontrollers in part because from here it gets pretty monotonous because Intel basically wins for a while. I might pick that up later. Also if this post gets any longer it'll be annoying to scroll past. Here is a sample from a post I have in my drafts since May:

I have some notes on the weirdo PowerPC stuff that shows up here it's mostly interesting because of where it goes, not what it is. A lot of it ends up in games consoles. Some of it goes into mainframes. There is some of it in space. Really got around, PowerPC did.

[pozartaa]

08.11.24 UTRZYMANIE WAG.I dzień 616 ważen1e:

Limit +/- 2100 kal.

Wybrane posiłki

Nie liczę kal. od: 121 dni.

Kochani nastał piątek i jak co dwa tygodnie sprawdzam co tam się dzieje pod stopami. Drugi raz chyba w historii całego w@zen1a mamy constans

Waga sprzed dwóch tygodni i dziś (177 cm)

BMI 18.4 granica niedovag1 ale wszystko do zniesienia i jak najbardziej akceptowalne. Jestem zadowolona. Następne statystyki 22.11.24. aktualizacja tradycyjnie w opisie bloga i poście przypiętym. Nie ma się nad czym obsrywać.

***

Dziś mam na noc, a jutro i po jutrze znowu wolne. Później już grafik idzie normalnie. Dostałam jeszcze od sąsiadki dżem z dyni i mango.

Dzemożerna nie jestem, ale ten jest zajebisty - bardzo oryginalny smak. Jeden słoik oddam Ukraińskiej Królewnie

Za pomocą tłumacza napisałam etykietę po ukraińsku 😆 pewnie ją to troche rozśmieszy. Kiedy piszę do niej za pomocą tłumacza zawsze wychodzą śmieszne rzeczy. (Nie muszę pisać za pomocą tłumacza - ona świetnie mówi po polsku. A jak się zepnie to nawet akcentu mocno nie słychać).

***

Dziś na obiad gulasz z dynią i kurczakiem. Muszę powiedzieć, że wiedźmińska książka kucharska stanęła na wysokości zadania - jest pycha. Nawet S. zjadł ze smakiem. Niestety jest tylko na dziś i na jutro... I znowu muszę coś ugotować 😬. Gdybym się nie podzieliła z "małżem" było by więcej i szczerze - trochę mu tego żałuję. Ale nic nie powiem 🙊.

***

"Małż" powiedział wczoraj, że statystyczny oglądacz internetu nie lubi kolaży... A ja tu ostatnio sram kolażami jakbym wczoraj odkryła program do edycji zdjęć. Czy to prawda czy nie? (Nie obrazę się za szczerość, bo nie chodzi tylko o moje kolaże ale tak ogólnie o tę formę prezentacji kontentu wizualnego)

***

Tradycyjnie drzemka przed pracą. I trochę kotospamu . Dziś w całości kotospam ze Svensonem

Dobrej nocy wam życzę i tradycyjnie pozdrawiam wszystkich nocnych stróżów i nocną zmianę na Tmblerze 🌙🌛⭐

[commodorez]

Let's take a moment to remember my imperfect, but ever useful portable XP powerhouse, the Toshiba Satellite P25-S507. Probably my favorite laptop of all time. It's old, but hardly vintage yet. I was given one as a hand-me-down after it grenaded its own RAM a year after it was purchased.

I used it as my music jukebox, played a ton of Command & Conquer games on it, did my high school and college school work, talked with my friends on AIM, Skype Teamspeak and IRC, edited videos, programmed on it, did image editing in photoshop.

Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR SRAM stock (mine was upgraded to 1GB and later 2GB), ~60GB hard drive, 17" WXGA TFT LCD, Windows XP (Home, but we upgraded it to Pro), ethernet jack AND wifi, DVD burner, SD card slot, all coming in at just shy of 10lbs of computer.

I either had it sitting on my desk next to my desktop computer (P4 or Phenom II x4), or used it sitting on my bed with a wooden board under it to give it sufficient ventilation so it wouldn't overheat or burn my legs. I disassembled that laptop several times over its lifetime, and replaced:

keyboards twice

the screen once (for the backlight)

4 hard drives

RAM once to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB

sound card subsystem once

battery twice

DVD drive once

Eventually after it destroyed TWO IDE SSDs (yes, those are a thing you can buy) after a shorter than normal lifespan, I realized it was a losing battle and gave up the fight. I realized that it no longer served as a laptop, it couldn't keep pace with newer versions of Skype (before Discord was a thing), and sure as hell wasn't going to run Discord. It got slower and slower at running simple websites like my email, or youtube -- things that it used to handle just fine.

The form factor was limiting, and it was outmatched for the times, so I finally gave up and decided to retire it in favor of building a dedicated power-house XP desktop to do the jobs that it excelled at.

I bought a spare for parts to supplement it, so maybe one day I'll install a fresh hard drive (either spinning rust, or an IDE to m.2 adapter), and bring it back to a working state.

[hydralisk98]

Utalics' LibreVast "DataProcessingSystem"

"Fantasy" computer system inspired by the SEGA DreamCast, StarDragonModels' Cosmos, the Sanyo 3DO TRY, the OUYA, the Famicube and the Nintendo 64DD.

Specifications

48-bit RISC-V-like Juniper6 SDPm (symbolic data processor module) x2-x6

Using 12-bit words as most fundamental computer unit (the smallest four binary digits )

Twelve generic 12-bit registers ( A,B,C,D,E,F,U,V,W,X,Y,Z; )

Four special-use registers (48-bit program counter, 24-bit storage accumulator, links 4-bit register & 20-bit scientific notation coefficient )

Includes a deque data structure component that can store up to ~64 12-bit elements

A RISC-like ISA { Load value to register, Load from register to register, Load from memory to register, Store register value in memory, Compare register to register, Compare register with value, Branch if equal, Branch if less, Branch if more, Branch unconditionally, Add value to register, Add register to register, Subtract value from register, Substract register from register, Bitwise Shift right, Bitwise Shift left, Bitwise Rotate left, Bitwise Rotate right, deque INJECT, deque PUSH, deque POP, deque EJECT, deque PEEK, deque DROP, deque DUPLICATE, deque SWAP, deque OVER, deque ROTATE CLOCKWISE, deque ROTATE COUNTERCLOCKWISE, deque ROLL, deque BACKPEEK, deque REVERSE ROLL, deque REVERSE DUPLICATE, deque BACKSWAP, deque UNDER, deque BACK ROTATE CLOCKWISE, deque BACK ROTATE COUNTERCLOCKWISE, deque REVERSE DROP, deque PAD, deque REVERSE PAD;), NOT, NOR, NAND, AND, OR, XOR, Carry, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, Halt, Noop; }

64-bit wide instructions { 8-bit opcode, (6-8 extension?) 4-bit register, 48-bit data }

Expanded UTF-8 encoding

480x288p RGBA 12-bit/channel screen resolution at 60 FPS

144MW Unified Memory

48MW Video RAM for 48-bit programmable opacity display

48MW Audio RAM for 8D audio

4MW SRAM for libre bootloader & machine-level utilities

48GW Storage (using the last 16GW as swap)

DirectMemoryAccess feature

32-bit stereo sound

SAM= Symbolic Analog Monitor, secular overseer system daemon that handles much software time-sharing functions in a transparent and empowering manner

MAM= Magickal Agent Mentor, group of utilities for spiritual esoteric and user guidance

WAX= Wirebox Analog eXecutive, low-power analog processor for timeless processing

ZeraDPS (ZealOS-like operating system)

VeneraDIS (Linux-like desktop environment / window manager)

Sasha (Fish-like programmable shell)

Nucleus496 (Microkernel with Linux-like reliability)

Brainstorm for Angora

Programmable Autonomous Organizations (eq. to DAOs)

Mesa (multimedia and hypermedia utilities)

Macroware Veina (rich media editor with cell editing & multi-user wiki editing support, between LibreOffice and NVIM)

4Kard (cardfile / hypercard bulletin board and session time-sharing server system)

Fidel (high-level programming language quite similar to the likes of F#)

Matra (OpenXanadu equivalent as global information system / public-access wiki)

Prospero (multi-player game series by Vixen softworks aka Valve)

Solarmonk (single-player game series by Magnata softworks aka Bethesda)

Milix 3D modelling libre software similar to Blender and AutoCAD

INMOS (Assyrian/Morocco own competitor to ITS & CLADO, from '68)

CLADO (first popular operating system in Angora, developed in '59)

ITS (competitor to CLADO, developed in '63)

Perseus (successor / half-merger between most operating systems, timestamped in 1970)

COS-5 (COS-310 DIBOL environment wth Tmux windowing, TAKO Emacs text editor & Bish shell)

SASS (early Windows equivalent from EBM and Macroware, not very popular)

Van (Win98/ME/ArcaOS-like, still not very popular)

Synod (Ring-0 Microsoft Bob equivalence with very cute graphics and successful with the youth)

Nomad (Uxn / Plan9 / Inferno)

Tiger (C-like programming language, similar to Nim, Lobster, Python and Lua)

Chateau (OpenIndiana / Haiku / PhantomOS / macOS)

Arbav subsystem { affirmation-based emulation, voice-operated system and analog GAI modular section }

Symbolic Algebra system { Fractions, soviet balanced ternary operations, simplifier, garbage collection, arbitrary precision arithmetic, mathematical algorithms & special functions, polynomials, artificial neural network emulation alternative, mathematical constants, optimizations, linear & non-linear equations, integral transformations, series operations, matrix operations, statistical computation, plotting graphs, charts/diagrams?, differential equations, signal processing, sound synthesis, SIN/COS/TAN, constraint logic programming, API library of addon functions; }

FastMath Co-Operative Processing Unit { Multiply, Division, Floating Point Arithmetics, Random Number Generator, POSIX-compliance, optimized code generation, string manipulations, base converters, bitwise logic operators?, square roots, exponents, logarithmic, trigonometrics; }

BASIC + DIBOL

PacoLisp (tiny & versatile low-level) & MiraLisp (much infrastructure & documentation)

HaxelN (virtual memory editor)

Hixi (powerful scripting spreadsheet editor, not by Macroware)

Nao (open media document specification like DolDOC)

Maskoch, disk / partition / physical media editor

Zira I/O, bus, drivers and card expansions

PETSCII-like graphical primitives set

Athena (JVM eq.)

Argdown (extended LaTex / Markdown specification)

Witness (Swift-like)

Mao (visual programming language between Fortran, Turtle graphics and AGAT Robic)

Ruin (very advanced debugger & cryptoanalysis utility suite)

Monada (a famous code poem written in the seventies, similar to a benchmarking "Hello, World!" program for synthetics)

SMall-Talk (professional programming language for databases and parallelist mainframe operations)

Adwa (Multilingual symbolic programming system layer similar to IPL)

'Maniac' operating system (MUSIC/SP eq.)

[quartz-components]

The ESP32 is a development board developed by Espressif systems. It can be programmed using Arduino IDE and ESP-IDF. It has higher processing power than ESP8266 but it is more costly and bigger in physical dimension than ESP8266. It has a built in Bluetooth module and CAN protocol and SRAM. It has 36 GPIO Pins with a CPU clock of 160MHz. It has 12-bit ADC onboard and supports CAN, UART, I2C and I2S. It can be used in prototyping IoT products, Low power Battery operated application, small range networking projects, and with the projects which require many Input Output Pins and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

[asspull3x]

I just had another thought about the possibility of CD-ROM support on the A3X.

If not as part of the BIOS, I could imagine a "driver" cartridge that, besides what the BIOS offers, adds ISO-9660 filesystem functions and handles finding, loading, and executing a program on the CD's data track. The cart itself has battery-backed SRAM for any CD-ROM based games to use, so it doubles as its own memory card.

Any program, be it the driver cart or otherwise, can detect the drive unit and use it to play CD-DA tracks or read raw 2 KiB data track sectors.

So path one: special cartridge offers CD-ROM filesystem support, handles loading games from CD, hosts SRAM. Path two: any other program can also see and control the drive unit (read raw sectors, play CD-DA), may have its own filesystem driver.

Does that make sense?

[kawaoneechan]

So, AIIIx, alias A3x, with felin mascots? I am just curious how much this could be used as a virtual storytelling device of sorts... But also because it is an emulator, pretty much.

For instance, can we have a global, long-term variable, e.g. a name, that is being kept in our A3x?

The A3X has no internal, persistent, shared storage available between cartridges or disk-borne programs like for example the internal memory of a CD-I player. What it does have is:

disk support, with plain FAT12 formatted diskettes and FAT16/32 hard drives, so when you think about it the only qualifier that has to be struck is "internal".

no care for disk-borne programs detecting certain cartridges and mucking around with any battery-backed SRAM that might be on those cartridges. ("You like Castlevania, don't you~")