In May 1977, some important research result was disclosed by Fairchild and Siemens. Hughes went on to produce this new EEPROM devices. In February 1977, Eliyahou Harari at Hughes Aircraft Company invented a new EEPROM technology using Fowler-Nordheim tunnelling through a thin silicon dioxide layer between the floating-gate and the wafer. In 1978, this trademark right is granted and registered as No.1,342,184 in Japan, and still survives as of March 2018. In 1975, NEC's semiconductor operations unit, later NEC Electronics, currently Renesas Electronics, applied the trademark name EEPROM® to Japan Patent Office.
But in general, programmable memories, including EPROM, of early 1970s had reliability and endurance problems such as the data retention periods and the number of erase/write cycles.
The theoretical basis of these devices is Avalanche hot-carrier injection. Studied, invented, and manufactured some electrically re-programmable non-volatile devices until 1977. Toshiba, Sanyo (later, ON Semiconductor), IBM, Intel, NEC (later, Renesas Electronics), Philips (later, NXP Semiconductors), Siemens (later, Infineon Technologies), Honeywell (later, Atmel), Texas Instruments, Most of the major semiconductor manufactures, such as
In 1972, a type of electrically re-programmable non-volatile memory was invented by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba, who is also known as the inventor of flash memory. Which used Renesas Electronics' flash memory integrated in single-chip microcontrollers. One of their research studies includes MONOS ( metal- oxide- nitride-oxide- semiconductor) technology, These papers have been repeatedly cited by later papers and patents. They fabricated an EEPROM device in 1972, and continued this study for more than 10 years. In 1971, the earliest research report was presented at the 3rd Conference on Solid State Devices, Tokyo in Japan by Yasuo Tarui, Yutaka Hayashi, and Kiyoko Nagai at Electrotechnical Laboratory a Japanese national research institute. In the early 1970s, some studies, inventions, and development for electrically re-programmable non-volatile memories were performed by various companies and organizations.
2 Theoretical basis of FLOTOX structure.
#Usb eeprom programmer circuit diagram serial#
EEPROMs, however, are still used on applications that only require small amounts of storage, like in serial presence detect. Many microcontrollers include both: flash memory for the firmware, and a small EEPROM for parameters and history.Īs of 2020, flash memory costs much less than byte-programmable EEPROM and is the dominant memory type wherever a system requires a significant amount of non-volatile solid-state storage. There is no clear boundary dividing the two, but the term "EEPROM" is generally used to describe non-volatile memory with small erase blocks (as small as one byte) and a long lifetime (typically 1,000,000 cycles). In an EEPROM that is frequently reprogrammed, the life of the EEPROM is an important design consideration.įlash memory is a type of EEPROM designed for high speed and high density, at the expense of large erase blocks (typically 512 bytes or larger) and limited number of write cycles (often 10,000). An EEPROM has a limited life for erasing and reprogramming, now reaching a million operations in modern EEPROMs. Originally, EEPROMs were limited to single-byte operations, which made them slower, but modern EEPROMs allow multi-byte page operations. EEPROMs can be programmed and erased in-circuit, by applying special programming signals. A cross section of legacy UV-EPROM structure.ĮEPROM (also E 2PROM) stands for electrically erasable programmable read-only memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers, integrated in microcontrollers for smart cards and remote keyless systems, and other electronic devices to store relatively small amounts of data by allowing individual bytes to be erased and reprogrammed.ĮEPROMs are organized as arrays of floating-gate transistors.