I'm trying to determine the life of some EEPROM. I will be erasing a byte (setting to 0x00, clearing a parity bit) as frequently as I will be writing to it. So if setting it to 0x00 counts as a wear cycle, I will effectively be having the number of cycles I can use that address.
Does writing a 0 count as a wear cycle or not?
EDIT: it is the act of flipping a bit back and forth that I am trying to estimate wear on, not writing a 0, since EEPROM is 0xFF when erased. So, if I start with erased memory (0xff) set an address to 0x00, then back to 0xff, then back to 0x00, does this count as two wear cycles or three?
Best Answer
See also 100k EEPROM writes "per bit" or as a whole?
The polarity is the other way up for most chips: "erase" sets a byte or group of bytes to all 1s. So you need to be a little careful. Because writing the byte to 0x00 incurs an erase and a write, and then setting it to e.g. 0x01 incurs another erase (to 0xFF) then a write.