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F-RAM for Smart E-Meters Slide 4

Design problems that engineers face when designing Smart E-Meters is they must log all energy consumption and diagnostic data. Designers would prefer to do that in milliseconds instead of minutes. Smart E-Meter EEPROMs require 5 ms of active power per Page-write for Soak time. This Soak time requires additional capacitors or batteries to perform a Page-write On Power Loss. Typical Smart E-Meters applications exceed the one million write-cycle limitation of EEPROM. Wear leveling is required to improve the Write Endurance of EEPROM over a Smart E-Meter’s fifteen year lifespan. Wear leveling requires up to eight-times the memory density and additional software, increasing cost and complexity. Utility companies prefer Smart E-Meters with low power budgets. Many utility companies specify a maximum 1-W consumption max for a Smart E-Meter. Eliminating the Soak time provides a larger power budget for other components in the system design. F-RAM solves these problems by requiring no Soak Time, enabling fast-write, immediately at Bus speed. F-RAM requires no additional capacitors or batteries to keep the system up to allow for Soak time. The F-RAM provides a hundred trillion write cycles or ten to the fourteenth. That is two-hundred times the lifespan of a typical Smart E-Meter. Finally F-RAM consumes two to five times less active power than EEPROM. Therefore, F-RAM offers the customer an opportunity to replace EEPROMS with a superior solution.

PTM Published on: 2015-01-26