STMicro Unveils Page EEPROM Chips — Blending the Benefits of EEPROM and Flash Memory

STMicroelectronics has announced the launch of a new type of memory device it's calling Page EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) — claiming to offer the power efficiency of a traditional EEPROM with the capacity and speed of a flash memory module.

"The intelligent edge has evolved quickly and is profoundly changing demands on embedded memory storage density, performance, and power consumption," claims STMicro's Philippe Ganivet, manager of the company's EEPROM product line, of the company's new products. "Our new Page EEPROM is the perfect ultra-low-power memory to complement a microcontroller for remote IoT [Internet of Things] modules that operate on battery power."

The Page EEPROM is, the company claims, the best of both words: it offers a power efficiency in excess of most rival EEPROMs, including a deep power-down mode of 1µA and a reduced write current of 1.5mA, yet delivers performance 16 times higher — a claimed 320Mb/s read speed. Longevity, meanwhile, is rated at a 100-year data retention and a 500,000-cycle write endurance — several times higher, the company points out, than conventional serial flash modules.

"ST’s Page EEPROM is the perfect non-volatile memory, a true best-of-both worlds solution that enabled us to achieve the ambitious targets we set when creating the latest generation of our flagship product family of GPS trackers, IoT devices, and all other designs where high performance, high reliability, small size, and low power are required," claims BitFlip Engineer's Patrick Kusbel, an early recipient of Page EEPROM samples. "The M95P is up to 50 times faster yet consumes as little as one-tenth the power and delivers five times the reliability — at 500k writes compared to 100k writes — typical of other parts we used before. It's a game changer."

The company has confirmed three models of Page EEPROM for launch: the M95P08 8Mb (1MB), M95P16 16Mb (2MB), and M95P32 32Mb (4MB) variants. All support byte-level operations, page, sector, and block eras, and page programming of up to 512 bytes, plus buffer-based loading for writing to several pages simultaneously. The X-NUCLEO-PGEEZ1 evaluation board hosts a single M95P32 Page EEPROM, making it accessible over an SPI bus — and connecting an STM32 Nucleo-144 or STM32 Nucleo-64 as a shield for rapid experimentation.

More information on the new parts, which start at $0.50 in tray quantities, is available on the STMicro website; the company is selling the X-NUCLEO-PGEEZ1 directly for $40.