AN5385K

Serial EEPROM Endurance AN537 Everything a System Engineer Needs to Know About Serial EEPROM Endurance The term “endurance” has become a confusing parameter for both users and manufacturers of EEPROM products. This is largely because many semiconductor vendors treat this important application-dependent reliability parameter as a vague specmanship topic. As a result, the system engineer often designs without proper reliability information or under-utilizes the EEPROM as an effective solution. Endurance (the number of times an EEPROM cell can be erased and rewritten without corrupting data) is a measure of the device’s reliability, not its parametric performance. As such, endurance is not achieved by somehow making EEPROM devices more durable or robust to extend the life of the intrinsic erase/write cycle, but rather by reducing their defect-density failure rates. This has a direct impact on the design engineer characterizing EEPROM memory needs for an application and evaluating components from various manufacturers. The system design engineer needs to understand not only the relationship between the application, expected use and failure mechanisms, but also how the manufacturer has arrived at published endurance data for its components. This tutorial volume is intended to clarify some of the issues in the industry and provide a tool for the system design engineer, the system reliability engineer, and the component engineer to determine EEPROM reliability and understanding how...