Memory is an irreplaceable part of any device. Today, memories can be largely classified into many different categories, but are mainly narrowed down to two of their types i.e. Volatile and Non-volatile, which are then classified into further more review film types.
Let’s start from the beginning, from the time, methods for memory erasability came into the picture. Earlier the information placed in the chips used photolithographic or mechanical methods which could not be erased. But after some advancements, there came methods to erase the memory electronically. Two of which are EEPROM and Flash memory.
When EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) was introduced, it could only be cleared in a large quantity and could only be used in the circuitry for read operation. Later, some improvements made sure of its erasability capabilities to smaller regions if not individual bytes and also be used in for writing and not only read operations. Though Flash Memory came after EEPROM, it still was used when the need arises to erase large chunks of information and not on an individual byte level. Large quantity erasure was there as it allows for compactly storing information, which was not possible in EEPROM. This being said, though Flash is a type of EEPROM, the only major difference between these two is the read/write/erase logic.
In-depth understanding of EEPROM & Flash Memory
EEPROM is a type of non-volatile memory whose data does not get erased even when there is no power. About 99% of the EEPROMS today have a serial communication protocol such as I2C or SPI. EEPROM uses NOR gate, which is comparatively faster than of NAND gate used by the Flash memory. It is observed in a lot of data sheets that we can have up to 1 million read/writes per cell before damaging the memory. Also, it usually takes around 5ms to make the newly overwritten data non-volatile.