Designing Serial EEPROMS Into Microcontroller Systems

Serial EEPROM devices are finding their way into more and more microcontroller applications. Almost any microcontroller system can find a use for EEPROM to store necessary software parameters or to provide read/write flexibility to the product. For the most part, semiconductor manufacturers have not found cost effective means for processing EEPROM on the same chip as the microcontroller. As a result semiconductor manufacturers such as National Semiconductor and ICT have developed families of low density serial EEPROMs targeted for use in microcontroller applications. The serial EEPROM provides microcontroller system designers with a simple interface to accessing small amounts of nonvolatile memory with virtually no sacrifice to board space.