First post, by mpe
I've been recently dealing with a bulk number of SRAM chips for my 2MB cache socket 4 system project.
In order to streamline the testing I crated a simple device using my Arduino Mega and wrote a program that tests 28 or 30-pin SRAM chips. Basically it writes data to every address of the SRAM chip and reads it back using different read/write cycles as described in the data sheets.
It worked great and was a great help compared to testing chips in a motherboard which I was doing before.
I was thinking taking this one step further and create a device to measure/test the minimum access time of SRAM chips. The purpose would be:
1. to compare advertised times with those expected and identify remarked fake chips
2. to handpick chips that perform the best for extreme overclocking.
Obviously the problem is that my Arduino Mega is a 16 MHz device so it doesn't have enough timer precision and instruction latency to deal with nanosecond time intervals on digital outputs needed for testing -10 or -15 ns chips at the maximum rate.
So I need to scale my prototype up a bit. Arduino makes a 84 MHz ARM based device. It is 3.3V, but with some effort could be adapted I think.
But before I burn time and money on this I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts whether this is at all feasible. Is the above board enough beefy enough to communicate with chips at 10ns precision? Or do I need something even better?