STMicroelectronics announced the addition of a 16-Mbit memory chip with 4-Kbyte sectors to the page-erasable M25PE serial Flash family, which is ideal for PC BIOS applications as well as for optical disk drives, digital voice recorders, networking products and set-top boxes. The M25PE16 is accessed through an SPI-compatible serial bus operating at up to 50MHz and is the first Serial Flash device from ST with 4 Kbyte subsectors. The memory is organized as 32 sectors. Each sector contains 256 pages and each page is 256 bytes wide. Moreover, each sector is divided into 16 subsectors of 16 pages. The memory can be written or programmed 1 to 256 bytes at a time, using the Page Write or Page Program instructions. It can be erased a page at a time, a subsector at a time, a sector at a time, or as a whole using the Bulk Erase instruction. The fine Erase and Program granularity makes it ideal for storage of BIOS parameters. The memory offers protection features to prevent accidental programming or erasure.

The memory can be Write Protected by either hardware or software using mixed volatile and non-volatile protection features, depending on the application needs. The protection granularity is of either 64-Kbytes (sector granularity) or 4-Kbytes (subsector granularity inside sector 0 and sector 31). The M25PE16 operates on a single supply voltage of 2.7V to 3.6V and is specified for the -40 to +85 degrees C operating temperature range. It features a 1-microamp deep power-down mode to reduce system power consumption, and includes a JEDEC standard Two-Byte electronic signature for easy device identification. Data retention is specified as greater than 20 years, with more than 100,000 Erase/Program cycles per sector. Samples of the M25PE16, in S08W and the MLP8, 5mm x 6mm, RoHS-compliant ECOPACK packages, are available now, with volume production planned for January 2007. Pricing is $1.20 in quantities of 100,000.