The x86 Microprocessors: 8086 to Pentium, Multicores, Atom and the 8051 Microcontroller, 2nd Edition

12

Semiconductor Memory Devices

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN

• The concepts associated with semiconductor memory.
• The internal architecture of SRAM.
• The principle of operation of DRAM memory.
• The control signals associated with DRAM.
• The reason why SDRAM is considered to be superior to DRAM.
• The different types of programmable memory.
• The necessity for having cache in a system.
• The different cache mapping techniques used.
• The cache structure of x86 processors.

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 ...