Tell me more ×
Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for electronics and electrical engineering professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It's 100% free, no registration required.

I'm learning about the different memory access modes for SRAM. (Specific datasheet available here.) As I understand, there is "asynchronous mode", "page mode" and "burst mode".

Page mode is an extension of asynchronous mode to efficiently deal with adjacent read accesses. Page 12 says that such a page mode does not exist for write accesses.

Why do we not have page mode write accesses? Are there any fundamental restrictions for such write accesses?

share|improve this question

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Yes, there is a reason you can't do a bunch of writes together. In reads you can change the address while the output is enabled and the only problem is the time for the data to settle. For writes if you change the address while write enable is low (and it is level-sensitive), you would write to other addresses since one bit would change before another.

share|improve this answer
One could design a chip for use with "gray coded" address changes (i.e. write four bytes where the LSB's go 00 01 11 10). I expect that, in practice, many asynchronous SRAMs would be perfectly happy and reliable if driven in that way, though I don't think I've seen any specified as allowing it. – supercat Apr 13 '12 at 20:47

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.