embeddedTS’s customers often need industrial embedded solutions designed for remote deployment. As such, there are a few constraints these types of deployments often come up against:

• Low, often unstable, power either through batteries or an intermittent power source.
• Data integrity issues that are associated with these power conditions.
• A device that can be restored without intervention once power has stabilized.

These constraints have caused us to focus our designs towards low power, ultra-reliable single board computers with some systems in place to ensure this reliability. Such as the TS-SILO system for power management and insurance or offering SLC eMMC memory Now, we’ve taken the next step in our designs to include F-RAM.

Ferroelectric RAM technology (F-RAM) contains a thin ferroelectric film of lead zirconate titanate, commonly referred to as PZT. The atoms in the PZT change polarity in an electric field, thereby producing a power-efficient binary switch. The most critical aspect of the PZT is that it is not affected by a power disruption, making F-RAM a reliable nonvolatile memory.

F-RAM memories combine the nonvolatile data storage capability of ROM with the fast speeds of RAM. F-RAMs have four distinct advantages over other nonvolatile memory technologies: fast write speed, extremely high endurance, low power consumption, and virtually limitless endurance for read/write cycles. Other benefits of F-RAM include:

• Low power (as low as 300 µA active and 6 µA standby current)
• Instant, non-volatile data capture
• 100-trillion read/write cycle endurance
• No batteries required to retain stored data
• Radiation and magnetic field tolerant
• Fast writes at full interface speed