3 ms·

I'm not an expert in the field but I was under the impression that SRAM worked completely differently, using a bi-stable transistor circuit and no capacitor, so

• jjoonathan 8y ago
  No, I was using "amplifier" in a slightly more general sense to mean "a circuit that uses power to turn a weakly driven signal into a strongly driven signal." You are absolutely correct that a SRAM cell would drive a near zero signal closer to zero and that this behavior differs from a linear amplifier which would drive a near zero signal further away from zero. Here was my conundrum: a more general term like "active circuit" risked leaving people behind while a more specific term like "buffer" or "driver" didn't highlight the analogy between SRAM and DRAM. I chose "amplifier" as a compromise, hoping that people who were familiar enough to worry about bistability would be comfortable with the generalized definition while people who barely hanging on would miss that detail entirely but still get my point. Sounds like I caught you in the middle. Sorry for the confusion.
• a1369209993 8y ago
  Technically yes, since the gate (control input) of a field effect transistor is functionally a capacitor, with the source-drain connection acting as a very crude sense amplifier. (You can actually observe this with some discrete MOSFETs, by attaching them to a breadboard in series with a LED and tapping the gate line against VCC or ground to turn them on or off.)