FRAM Micro Targets Medical And Industrial Apps

Sept. 30, 2010

Fujitsu's 8-bit MB95R203A has 8 Kbytes of high speed, non-volatile FRAM program and data storage.

1 of Enlarge image

MB95R203A block diagram

Fujitsu's latest FRAM microcontroller address a range of rugged applications including those in medical and industrial environments. The 8-bit MB95R203A employs Fujitsu's Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) technology to provide 8 Kbytes of high speed, non-volatile storage.

Fujitsu's FRAM can be erased and rewritten 10¹⁵ times. It has a guaranteed data retention of 10 years and it does not require any wear leveling technology. The MB95R203A's FRAM can be partitioned as either RAM or program ROM. The ability allows the micro to be used for a variety of different applications and programming requirements.

The 20MHz MB95R203A uses a F²MC-9FX core. It has a 10MHz on-chip oscillator and can run using 1.8V to 3.6V power supplies. The chip has 496 bytes of RAM. Peripherals include 16 shared I/O pins, UART, I²C, and a 6-channel, 10-bit ADC. The dual 8-bit or 16-bit timer can handle PWM chores. The chip uses Fujitsu's 1 wire debug interface.

The MB95R203A is available in 24-pin DIP or 20-pin SOP packages. Sample pricing is $1.60.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.