I need to be able to test some VERY old SRAM chips - HM-6508-9. These are 1K x 1 chips, 16 pin.

Anyone know of an old (or new) tester that can handle these ancient things?

Cheers,
Steve

 

I would think this would be a simple task for a microcontroller application. It would not require very fancy programming at all

 

I have thought about building my own tester, but most of my projects take a looooooong time to complete. This is for work, to repair a down machine that should be in production, making money for the company. So time involved is definitely an issue here.

I was hoping that someone had had experience using an old programmer, possibly one of the old JDR MTC series, or Needham's.

Cheers,
Steve

 

Once you are talking "money and company" it's probably best just to buy some new chips and replace them. Even if to replace some chips in banks (if there are a lot) as an aid to testing.

 

Those sound a lot like what the old Commodore PET's used to use, though I'm not sure. Those old computers used to go through RAM, and it didn't help they used a number that was later used for another chip. Made the old RAM unobtainium.

 

Exactly what are you testing? Just the ability to store and retrieve bits, or are you also checking timing?

Either way it isn't hard to do. I did it a few years back with a 3-byte ISA card plus a few monostables to force the read and write timing to just under the spec minimums.