STM's ACR Serial Bus EEPROM for PC Motherboards

STMicroelectronics just told us about a new dedicated chip for the Advanced Communication Riser (ACR) market. The M34A02 EEPROM is designed for plug and play cards that connect to the PC motherboard SMBus structure. The M34A02 stores the ACR configuration data, which can be read through the SMBus. The M34A02 memory architecture also offers the flexibility required to define both variable-size enumeration areas and defined-size vendor areas. The ACR configuration data includes the parameters describing the configuration of modem, Ethernet, phoneline, wireless networking, xDSL and audio functions available on the ACR card. The M34A02 EEPROM contains a two-wire SMBus serial interface that uses a bi-directional data line and one clock line. It's powered by a single 2.7V to 3.6V supply voltage and has a hardware write-control. The device is programmed by the ACR Card Issuer and the application retrieves card configuration data in read mode using the standard 100kHz SMBus bus protocol. The serial bus pin-out is also standard. STM says the M34A02 performance figures are more than one million erase/write cycles and data retention of more than 40 years. Other features include up to 16 Byte page write, together with random and sequential read modes, automatic address incrementing and enhanced ESD/latch-up behavior. The chips come in plastic small outline (SO8) or thin shrink small outline (TSSOP8) packages and are available now.