A student who is a huge fan of David Hasselhoff is working o

A student, who is a huge fan of David Hasselhoff, is working on a circuit that will make the red LEDs on the DE1 board go back and forth while playing the Knight Rider theme song. The student is trying to decide which memory to use to store the theme song. The student would like to have an impressive project with a long segment of the song, but does not want to spend too much time on overhead such as coding and reloading the song on the board.   The student will need to access 16 bits every 1/44100 seconds.

Recall that our DE1 board has the following memories:

239,616 bit SRAM on Cyclone II with access time 4ns for data words of 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 16, 18, 32, or 36 bits

512kB SRAM with access time 15ns for each 16 bit data word

4MB Flash memory with access time 60ns for each 8 bit data word

8MB SDRAM memory with access time 8ns for each 16 bit data word

Which memory would be best for this situation? Note there may be multiple correct answers, and the credit you receive for this question will depend on how thoroughly you justify your choice as compared to the other choices.

Solution

The best memory for this situation is either 512kB SRAM with access time 15ns for each 16 bit data word or 4MB Flash memory with access time 60ns for each 8 bit data word,

As SRAM \\SRAM retains its contents as long as electrical power is applied to the chip If the power is turned off or lost temporarily, its contents will be lost forever while DRAM has very short data lifetime-typically about four milliseconds.

Flash memory devices are high density, low cost, nonvolatile, fast (to read, but not to write), and electrically reprogrammable