Breadboarding RAM

If you’ve ever wanted to dive in and take a look at how memory hardware is implemented here is a good example of how to implement some latching circuits with ether BJT or CMOS transistors. BJTs require biasing resistors which increases the complexity and power consumption when compared to CMOS. If power consumption isn’t an issue you could certainly make some really fast logic.

Most modern on chip RAM is made using SRAM because it only takes six transistors to implement(vs eight) and is pretty fast. When it comes to density DRAM can get one bit of storage by using a single transistor and capacitor(putting the capacitor underneath he transistor can save even more space). All that said, latches and flip flops are still a very useful (and common) tool when working with digital circuits.

22 thoughts on “Breadboarding RAM

  1. pretty cool, i remember building transistor based memory on the S-Dec (an early prototyping board)

    you can also make shift registers this way, single transistor per stage and can clock in data at the speed of the astable stages.

  2. I remember back to my first electronics course at uni, the lecturer told us that there’d be a trick question in the final exam: “Draw a CMOS transistor”. Every year at least a few people would try to do it.

  3. This reminds me of the first “computer” I built in high school – it would add two numbers (set by toggle switches) in .001 second. One of the teachers asked whatever use something like that would be….

  4. Very interesting stuff for those who are learning digital electronics. Unfortunately it got ruined by Instructables which is among the worst places one should use. Please, stop posting stuff over there.

  5. @godi:
    1. pick a free webhoster of your choice
    2. pick an editor of your choice
    3. write a webpage about the hack you did
    4. upload it to the webhoster of step 1
    5. spread the address
    6. ???
    7. profit!

  6. Any free blog site would be preferable to Instructables :(

    Anyway, cool project :) It’s always fun to implement such common circuits in a way which makes it less abstract, akin to those people building 8-bit CPUs out of 74xx logic chips.

  7. i’m no expert, used to play with this stuff as a kid almost 20 years ago. afaik theres no such thing as a single CMOS transistor, as anything CMOS will be something made up of multiple MOS transistors. atleast thats the way i remember reading it anyway.

  8. The C in CMOS stands for complimentary. CMOS uses both P and N type transistors (MOSFETs) together. Therefore you can’t draw a CMOS transistor because CMOS is composed of multiple transistors. “Draw a CMOS transistor” is akin to saying draw a water atom.

  9. Thank’s pfargtl and jethomson, I think I get it. It is similar to a “Darlington transistor” in that it is two parts but one device. Like pants. Though I don’t think “Draw pants” would be a trick question.

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