So I'm trying to get some PDFs out of Murata for one of their products... and they won't give me access to the PDFs... unless I buy their dev-kit first
What a load of bullshit, does anyone know why they do this? Do they like to lose customers?
/rant
For a fun side project, the other day I was looking for a way to add memory to an FPGA. Rather than buy a big part to get lots of BRAM, I figured that an external SRAM would work well enough. Access to and from the memory is not very fast -- in the worst case the design reads and writes one bit every microsecond. The usual sync and async SRAM chips are too big and also expensive to the point where the bigger FPGA actually makes dollars sense.
Then I realized that serial access SRAMs are a thing and I started looking and came across PSRAMs (pseudo SRAMs) which store 16 Mb and they cost like $1.50 small quantities, from a company I'd never heard of called AP Memory. Their web site says "contact us for Verilog model," so I did, and got a reply demanding an NDA and a description of the product that will use the parts as well as (of course) estimated volume.
I sent a note back saying, "since you require me to sign an NDA for a simple Verilog model of a commodity part, surely you will understand when I say I cannot reveal any details at all about the design under any circumstances."
The reply to that was, "please send us your company's NDA form. Also, we ask about the project so we can recommend a specific device to meet your needs." Hello, asshole, your data sheets and Verilog models are sufficient to let me determine whether the part meets design needs. After one more reply, I wrote back and said, "oh, look, Microchip has suitable parts and they offer a Verilog model without onerous demands for information, and oh by the way my experience with Microchip's support has been nothing but stellar, so you're now on our 'not qualified' list."
The Microchip part is an SRAM, not a PSRAM, and its maximum serial clock rate is much slower than the PSRAM, but with quad SPI access it's still fast enough for the design.