computer memory

Magnetic drum memory

Magnetic drums, which had fixed read/write heads for each of many tracks on the outside surface of a rotating cylinder coated with a ferromagnetic material, were used for both main and auxiliary memory in the 1950s, although their data access was serial.

Magnetic core memory

About 1952 the first relatively cheap RAM was developed: magnetic core memory, an arrangement of tiny ferrite cores on a wire grid through which current could be directed to change individual core alignments. Because of the inherent advantage of RAM, core memory was the principal form of main memory until superseded by semiconductor memory in the late 1960s.

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Semiconductor memory

There are two basic kinds of semiconductor memory. Static RAM (SRAM) consists of flip-flops, a bistable circuit composed of four to six transistors. Once a flip-flop stores a bit, it keeps that value until the opposite value is stored in it. SRAM gives fast access to data, but it is physically relatively large. It is used primarily for small amounts of memory called registers in a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) and for fast “cache” memory. Dynamic RAM (DRAM) stores each bit in an electrical capacitor rather than in a flip-flop, using a transistor as a switch to charge or discharge the capacitor. Because it has fewer electrical components, a DRAM storage cell is smaller than SRAM. However, access to its value is slower and, because capacitors gradually leak charges, stored values must be recharged approximately 50 times per second. Nonetheless, DRAM is generally used for main memory because the same size chip can hold several times as much DRAM as SRAM.

Storage cells in RAM have addresses. It is common to organize RAM into “words” of 8 to 64 bits, or 1 to 8 bytes (8 bits = 1 byte). The size of a word is generally the number of bits that can be transferred at a time between main memory and the CPU. Every word, and usually every byte, has an address. A memory chip must have additional decoding circuits that select the set of storage cells that are at a particular address and either store a value at that address or fetch what is stored there. The main memory of a modern computer consists of a number of memory chips, each of which might hold many megabytes (millions of bytes), and still further addressing circuitry selects the appropriate chip for each address. In addition, DRAM requires circuits to detect its stored values and refresh them periodically.

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Main memories take longer to access data than CPUs take to operate on them. For instance, DRAM memory access typically takes 20 to 80 nanoseconds (billionths of a second), but CPU arithmetic operations may take only a nanosecond or less. There are several ways in which this disparity is handled. CPUs have a small number of registers, very fast SRAM that hold current instructions and the data on which they operate. Cache memory is a larger amount (up to several megabytes) of fast SRAM on the CPU chip. Data and instructions from main memory are transferred to the cache, and since programs frequently exhibit “locality of reference”—that is, they execute the same instruction sequence for a while in a repetitive loop and operate on sets of related data—memory references can be made to the fast cache once values are copied into it from main memory.

Much of the DRAM access time goes into decoding the address to select the appropriate storage cells. The locality of reference property means that a sequence of memory addresses will frequently be used, and fast DRAM is designed to speed access to subsequent addresses after the first one. Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) and EDO (extended data output) are two such types of fast memory.

Nonvolatile semiconductor memories, unlike SRAM and DRAM, do not lose their contents when power is turned off. Some nonvolatile memories, such as read-only memory (ROM), are not rewritable once manufactured or written. Each memory cell of a ROM chip has either a transistor for a 1 bit or none for a 0 bit. ROMs are used for programs that are essential parts of a computer’s operation, such as the bootstrap program that starts a computer and loads its operating system or the BIOS (basic input/output system) that addresses external devices in a personal computer (PC).

EPROM (erasable programmable ROM), EAROM (electrically alterable ROM), and flash memory are types of nonvolatile memories that are rewritable, though the rewriting is far more time-consuming than reading. They are thus used as special-purpose memories where writing is seldom necessary—if used for the BIOS, for example, they may be changed to correct errors or update features.