Karl Goetz wrote:
Thats interesting - so the chip contains a battery itself?
My understanding is that it's an ablutions-standard chip with a non-rechargeable
battery mounted as a 'top hat'. The practical result of this is that the global
population of SPARCstations and SPARCservers will stop working at some point in
the not-too-distant future, and unless Mostek (or whoever) is still making these
devices it will be necessary to graft on something like an AAA or coin cell
instead.
I've used these devices in embedded systems, and working from memory they come
in 2K and 8K variants with the top few bytes being used for clock and control
registers. There's a bit that controls whether the clock is running or the whole
device is switched to ultimate-low-power mode, but I've never seen anything
(except my own code, of course :-) that exploits this to extend device life.