https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/P5101L

It is soldered onto an adapter board with 151 year retention rating.

For just the chip (assuming you're gonna use battery/supercap)...

http://www.actionpinball.com/parts.php?item=5101

https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/5101

https://ksarcade.net/5101-cmos.html

https://www.jameco.com/z/5101-Major-Brands-IC-5101-CMOS-SRAM-1024-Bit-256x4-650ns_42198.html

B&I is having problems sourcing NVRAM components. There are some available on eBay and the pinballelectronics.com site shows availability.

WTF these things are going for $45 bucks now. If I only had stock, could be cleaning up.... oh well. the circuit boards do well.

The stock of FM16W08 is limited and expensive and I guess the price point reflects that. Should have bought a bunch of reels when they where still $2each. Blame covid. Infineon buying Cypress might have something to do with it as well.

I'm planning on going with coin batteries because of this. Sucks.

freakin a.. what happened to the $15 ones Yeah, I'll need some for some old sterns. Yeah with $45...may just have to think of different solutions....unless coin drop pays for it.

Arcadechips.com has them for $7 each.
https://arcadechips.com/product_info.php?products_id=28&osCsid=41abab8e8235750fe4f6bb8cc4b1d0df

Damon

The 5101 chip is what the NVRAM is eliminating. Based on the lack of availability of NVRAM though, the 5101 chips may make a come back.

Have you tested those lately? I also have a bunch of 5101 pulls (tested working) from about 40 years ago - 1978-1980, and today half of them don't seem to work, probably because of bit rot / electromigration.

Umm, not the 5101s in short supply, it's the NVRAM replacements.

I should have more stock of 5101 NVRAMs in a few weeks, but they're just being built out in very small batches at this point due to lack of time. Unfortunately that module design is a bear to build and I've had to limit how many I can offer -- it was a loss leader for years when it was priced similar to the 6116/6264 and I just don't have the time to lose on it any more.

Marco does have some stock of a few nvrams I sell and they are buying it direct, same price as everyone else at this point. They order a small handful, maybe 5-10x at a time a few times a year. Pricing is a bit more since they're a business and need to make a few bucks. Convenience is there for the customer being able to order a variety of parts from them in a single order.

FWIW, in terms of material costs, the underlying nvram has never been $2 from US distributors. Cheapest I remember is $3.75-4.50 per chip if bought in reels of 1000x and this was maybe 2012. Went up when Cypress bought RAMTRON, so probably $5-8 per chip from 2014 onward depending on full reel versus lower quantities. The only way you could get $2-3 parts was sourcing from China Marketplaces / sellers. You'd be lucky getting it for under $2 and having good parts, but that's just my take. I paid anywhere from $3-5 through most of the years, averaged out across US distributor orders at as high a pricing of $6-8 and alternatively sourced parts. With the competition on pricing through most of the years, there wasn't much profit margin with the quantity discounts offered at the time.

Only reason I kept selling parts after 2014 is I found out a supplier who had Cypress brand parts (this is shortly after Cypress bought RAMTON) and I felt I could trust those to be working parts more than some of the 50/50 risk of getting bad Ramtron parts. Otherwise I'd have been finished with selling nvram despite having helped create the market for it.

Everything was good with my supplier until 2019 when I got a reel that looked suspect. Supplier had told me he ran out, then he was looking for another vendor, then he had found parts. The packaging looked a bit different, the tape on reel looked different, enough chips had a bent leg on one corner -- I looked further and there were scuffs on some, different markings on the back of some. Definitely not the same quality. So that ended my desire to alternatively source cheaper parts. Not fun putting out $2500-3000 on reels to deal with bad parts. I had already soldered 150+ boards and had to toss them after like 20+ hours work.

I was going to use up remaining parts last year & figured I'd be out of nvram by end of year or maybe a bit into 2022. Luckily I was able to snag the last reel available at a US electronics vendor. Cost me 2.5x what I had paid, so my costs went up, but meant I could offer nvram for another 1-2 years.

Future availability of nvram products will depend on whether US distributors get stock and it's priced reasonably. Often this stuff just gets more expensive as companies get bought out or they fully discontinue the products. Usually happens like this where lead times are just delayed and delayed. Regardless, this parallel nvram is older tech and it's not surprising to me to see lead times stretch over years since Infineon is probably gauging demand for Cypress products they bought. Plenty of chips needed in the millions for auto manufacturing and other electronics, which are likely getting priority for a few years here.

I scored legit new cypress factory sealed boxes of reels for like 6-8 years straight no problems all around $2ea. They where sourced by an overseas broker that can buy direct from Cypress. They did not come out of China or ship from China. The last reel before things dried up was 2.25K each, had to buy full reels at a time. I have noticed that parts get cheaper closer to the COO you get. But that has dried up and my order keeps getting delayed to the point I don't know if it will come back. Blame Covid / Infineon purchase is my guess.

Under the RAMTRON brand they where $1.85each and got more expensive with Cypress.

I am not a long time seller of NVRAM. I include them with my boards as almost everyone wants NVRAM with a new board instead of SRAM. NVRAM is not my primary focus. In fact it's not even a focus of mine. I'll leave NVRAM to the big boys.

• I got my feet wet buying 10 units from a US merchant for about $10 a piece.
• I figured I would need more so I bought 100 units from a US merchant for about $7.50 a piece.
• I saw an unbeatable price from another US merchant and bought just shy of 200 units for about $3 a piece.

I am still working through my second purchase of 100 units. Most of the US big box merchants are out-of-stock and have been for a while. If they do get some stock it seems to get snapped up quickly. That's actually true for most semiconductors not just NVRAM.

Definitely helps to have contacts you can trust that can source direct. $2 is a heck of a price. I paid a bit more than that. There were times I paid $5-6 for some of what I sold in $10 modules (not a great way to make money lol). But yeah, only reason I was able to keep selling is I had found a vendor with Cypress parts I could trust at a reasonable price. Otherwise, I'd have been done in 2014-2015.

Haha. It's all good. Even when I was practically losing money for what I was selling it for, it wasn't selling in big boy amounts lol.

Rochester Electronics sometimes has then in the $3 range. That is the best I have seen from a USA supplier.

I am scraping the bottom of the barrel and every FM16(W)08(B) has to be saved for MPUs. I built my business around those little modules so it sucks being out of stock of them, but I have other things to work on.

MSD chips are cheap and readily available. Has anyone looked into making a MSD to 5101 adapter? This would be a great solution. Obviously 4GB or greater is overkill but if you're like me you have a bunch of older MSD chips lying around. An adapter that plugs into the 5101 socket that allows me to use my own chip would work great.

The overhead and development to do parallel memory to SD card is out of my league, likely more expensive, and might not even be possible. You would need a special memory controller that I'm not sure if anything like that even exists. Maybe hack on one of the parallel port to compact flash memory adapters that used to exist in the 90s before USB came around.

I’m just using Tadiran type lithium batteries. About $10. They last over 10 years and no blocking diode needed. Never saw one leak.