Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics

74 Chapter 4

www.newnespress.com

4.1 Development and History of Flash Memory

Flash is an extension of the fl oating gate method of manufacturing nonvolatile memory.

The fi rst sort of fl oating gate memory was the Erasable Programmable Read Only

Memory (EPROM), invented in the 1960s but not developed until the 1970s. In

EPROM, like in Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and Read Only Memory

(ROM), each memory bit was represented by a transistor.

Appendix C gives a list of some of the most signifi cant fl ash memory manufacturers.

It helps to understand how transistors work if you want to understand these circuits. In

a Field-Effect Transistor (FET), ...