Microchip Introduces Its Highest-Density EEPROM with 4 Mbit Serial

Portable consumer and medical devices including fitness trackers, hearing aids and glucose monitors as well as industrial, automotive and other systems often use customer-specific data sets to optimize the consumer experience. These nonvolatile data sets – including calibration constants, background conditions, user preferences and changing noise environments – often are adjusted by the end system or user a few bytes at a time. Serial Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) is the memory of choice for these applications providing nonvolatility, byte-level control, ease-of-use and low-power consumption. Microchip Technology Inc. today announced its new, highest-density EEPROM – the 25CSM04.

At 4 Mbit, Microchip’s new EEPROM becomes the largest EEPROM available to developers, doubling the 2 Mbit density designers previously were limited to. Until now developers have used lower-cost NOR Flash integrated circuits (ICs) for any 2 Mbit+ nonvolatile data set application. Because EEPROM offers performance advantages over NOR Flash, Microchip has responded to customer requests by introducing a larger 4 Mbit EEPROM. EEPROM advantages include a lower standby current (2µA vs. 15µA); the ability to perform single-byte, multi-byte, and full-page writes; shorter sector erase/rewrite times (5ms vs.300ms); and more erase/rewrite cycles (1M vs 100K).

The 25CSM04 becomes part of Microchip’s extensive nonvolatile memory product portfolio that integrates within Microchip’s total system solutions built around its 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors. Microchip’s extensive memory product family includes serial EEPROMs, NOR Flash, SRAM, and EERAM in all standard serial buses and all standard densities from 128-bit to 64 Mbit.

As a technology innovator in serial EEPROM for more than 30 years, Microchip delivers approximately one billion EEPROM devices annually.

Development Tools

Microchip’s 4 Mbit serial EEPROM devices are supported by the MPLAB^® Starter Kit for Serial Memory Products. The kit includes a serial memory interface board, serial EEPROM starter pack, USB cable, CD containing the MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Total Endurance^™ software model and a serial EEPROM interface tool.