Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Erase/Write cycles

Status
Not open for further replies.
I'm pretty very curious about PIC's erase/write cycles. Can't find them in the datasheet, or maybe I wasn't searching hard enough.

Are those PIC chips or other Erasable-Programmable m'controllers actually die when you erase/read/write a number of times? Are they really disposable after use? Cause I've been erase/write for almost many times on my PIC 16F690. :D
 
I'm pretty very curious about PIC's erase/write cycles. Can't find them in the datasheet, or maybe I wasn't searching hard enough.

Are those PIC chips or other Erasable-Programmable m'controllers actually die when you erase/read/write a number of times? Are they really disposable after use? Cause I've been erase/write for almost many times on my PIC 16F690. :D

Its on the first page of most PIC datasheets.:)
 

Attachments

  • esp01 Nov. 01.gif
    esp01 Nov. 01.gif
    4.5 KB · Views: 183
Last edited:
I'm pretty very curious about PIC's erase/write cycles. Can't find them in the datasheet, or maybe I wasn't searching hard enough.

Are those PIC chips or other Erasable-Programmable m'controllers actually die when you erase/read/write a number of times? Are they really disposable after use? Cause I've been erase/write for almost many times on my PIC 16F690. :D

I wouldn't worry about it, I've never found a problem - and I've used a single 16F628 for years and years.
 
I wouldn't worry about it, I've never found a problem - and I've used a single 16F628 for years and years.

As it states for Flash 100,000 cycles.

Say its reprogrammed 10 times/day, thats over 25 years.!

I would imagine the PIC pins would be well worn.:rolleyes:
 
I would imagine the PIC pins would be well worn.:rolleyes:

No, because I fit my target PIC in a turned pin socket, and then plug that into the socket on the target board - this avoids any possible damage to the PIC pins, and the turned pin socket pins are straight and perfectly aligned to go in the target socket.

Never damaged a PIC pin yet, and I've been using them since the DOS days :D
 
No, because I fit my target PIC in a turned pin socket, and then plug that into the socket on the target board - this avoids any possible damage to the PIC pins, and the turned pin socket pins are straight and perfectly aligned to go in the target socket.

Never damaged a PIC pin yet, and I've been using them since the DOS days :D

Funnily enough, so do I.

My comment was a metaphorical one, not literal.:p
 
I have managed to exceed the write cycles on a PIC. It was the data eeprom on a PIC16F877A. My code was supposed to check if the data had been written correctly and overwrite it only if it hadn't.

My code was wrong so it overwrote the data as soon as it had finished writing, so about every 2ms. I didn't notice and I left it running for a couple of hours.

After that, the bytes that I was writing to were stuck and couldn't be erased to 0xFF. The rest of the data EEPROM and everything else on the PIC worked fine.

However, I have never had any problems with manual programming. Even when developing code, and constantly trying new stuff, I have never had a PIC fail to program because of worn out EEPROM. Even on the 18F45J10 series, where the program flash memory endurance is typically 1000, minimum 100.

On applications where data needs to be stored in the EEPROM very regularly, every minute or more often, it is a good idea to rotate where it is stored so that the EEPROM doesn't wear out in one place.
 
I have managed to exceed the write cycles on a PIC. It was the data eeprom on a PIC16F877A. My code was supposed to check if the data had been written correctly and overwrite it only if it hadn't.

Yes, but that was data EEPROM, not program memory - so a different thing completely.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top