For the last four years or so, I have been harassing Microchip for
being too slow in developing PICs with EEPROM. At times, the response
has been a bit irritated. (Sorry 'bout that, MC). Eventually,
Atmel caught up with Microchip.

However, I will now officially stop hassling about EEPROM, or "flash,"
as some prefer to call it. Instead, I want PICs and AVRs with the new type
of ferroelectric memory! (Sorry again, MC and Atmel ;-)

The following quotes are from Johnsson, B.: "From Russia with love," New
Scientist, p. 37-39, 4 July 1998.

  "Symetrix has issued licenses for
  [the new ferroelectric material] Y-1 to some 14 companies, including
  giants such as NEC, Mitsubishi and Toshiba in Japan, Motorola in the
  US, Siemens in Germany and Hyundai in Korea. The rush to sign up is
  driven by the advantages that ferroelectrics offer over other
  nonvolatile memories--electrically erasable programmable read-only
  memory (EEPROM) and flash memory. Ferroelectric memories are more
  durable and operate at lower power. The fact that they are easy to
  manufacture--just three steps on top of the standard process for
  making silicon devices--should also make them cheaper.
    But by far the biggest plus is the speed at which information can
  be written to them. A ferroelectric memory can be erased and rewritten
  at least a thousand, and possibly as much as a million times faster
  than an EEPROM."

  "Matsushita's second product is a 64-kilobit memory embedded in an 8-bit
  silicon microprocessor."

A note: Y-1 is not a kind of PZT (which has been used by eg Ramtron,
and has an endurance of around a billion cycles) but has the chemical
name strontium bismuth tantalate, and appears to be fatigue free.

I wonder who will be the first to include ferroelectric memory on
their small processors. Microchip or Atmel? From an architectural
point of view, it perhaps makes a bit more sense for Atmel. In any
case, it certainly seems to be an interesting development path of any
microprocessor.

Martin Nilsson                           http://www.sics.se/~mn/
Swedish Institute of Computer Science    E-mail: mn@sics.se
Box 1263, SE-164 29 Kista                Fax: +46-8-751-7230
Sweden                                   Tel: +46-8-752-1574