hi everyone, i teach a graduate vlsi class at UT austin, and there were a couple of questions in my last lecture on DRAMs that i couldnt answer. the text (weste and harris, "cmos vlsi design", 3rd edition, excellent book) and my DRAM reference (keeth & baker, dram circuit design) werent much help, so i thought i'd post the questions on the net. - Q1. why is the bitline pre-charged to V_DD/2 (instead of V_DD). i thought this would be for performance, i.e., get a larger swing quicker, but at least from a simple model, the opposite seems to be true. perhaps it's related to power or noise? - Q2. shouldn't DRAM writes be faster than reads? (the logic being that in reads, the bitline is driven by the trench capacitor, but in writes the bitlinehas an active driver. perhaps the reason has something to do with senseamp logic compensating for the slow read.) looking forward to reading your replies, cheers, adnan