Close the Eprom Eeprom History and Hand Off by Name to NAND Flash

# Close the EPROM/EEPROM History and Hand Off, by Name, to NAND Flash

## 13. Closing This Series' Arc

This series told a specific, previously-uncovered chapter of non-volatile memory history: Dov Frohman's 1971 discovery at Intel, arrived at while investigating a reliability anomaly rather than pursuing a planned memory project; hot-electron injection as the mechanism EPROM and early EEPROM devices used to write a bit, named without re-deriving its physics; the literal quartz-window package and the twenty-to-thirty-minute UV-lamp procedure that made in-system reprogramming impossible and shaped how firmware debugging and field updates actually worked; the named Intel 1702/2704/2708 product line that put this technology into real systems; EEPROM's genuine business improvement — electrical, in-circuit erasure — described as a capability rather than a tunneling-physics derivation; the named vendors (Xicor, Seeq Technology, Atmel) who built real businesses on that capability; and the byte-level granularity that positioned EEPROM for small configuration data rather than bulk storage. The next chapter in this larger non-volatile-memory story — block-erase flash architecture displacing both EPROM and EEPROM for bulk storage, and the NAND-versus-NOR competition that followed — is not retold here. It is already told, in full, in this site's own live NAND Flash Memory: Architecture, Quantum Tunneling Physics, and 400-Layer 3D Scaling article, which this series hands off to by name.