
Introduction
We have talked about ‘memory’ all along the chapters of this book. We talked about
memory reading and writing, memory speed, main memory, secondary memory and
virtual memory. However, we are yet to examine the technical constituents of memory.
This chapter discusses the technology behind memory. Here, we will be talking only
about main or primary memory – the memory that the processor accesses directly, the
speed of which plays an important role in any computer system. This is semiconductor
memory and a first classification of it is as RAM and ROM. To understand the complete
hierarchy of memory as a memory system, the concept of ‘vir ...