Name the Eeprom Vendors Competing in This Era

# Name the EEPROM Vendors Competing in This Era

## 10. Who Actually Sold EEPROM, by Name

Several companies turned electrical erasability into shipped EEPROM product lines through the late 1970s and 1980s. Intel itself shipped early EEPROM parts, but a number of specialist and competing vendors built real businesses around the category: Xicor, founded in 1978, built its early identity substantially around EEPROM products and was a prominent independent supplier through the 1980s. Seeq Technology, founded in 1981 by former Intel engineers, specialized specifically in EEPROM and, later, flash memory development, and is a named example of engineering talent moving directly from the EPROM-era Intel teams into a dedicated EEPROM-focused startup. Atmel, founded in 1984, also built a significant EEPROM and later flash product business. These companies competed on byte-level erase/write granularity, endurance (how many erase-write cycles a cell could survive before wearing out), and programming voltage requirements — competitive dimensions that did not exist in the same form for mask ROM, and that gave EEPROM vendors a genuinely differentiated product category to compete within rather than a commodity part.