The UNI/O serial EEPROM is a single I/O EEPROM device that has been developed by Microchip. The EEPROM has been developed to work on the UNI/O Bus, a propriety single I/O bus protocol, also developed by Microchip.

Now that we have reviewed the different buses, I want to spend some time discussing a few of the UNI/O bus requirements. As you already learned the UNI/O bus uses a single I/O port. But let’s discuss what that means.

As the demand of small electronic devices continues to grow, we saw a need to develop a new family of non volatile serial memory devices that would fit inside of three pins SOT 23 package.

As embedded systems become smaller, a growing need exists to minimize I/O pin usage for communication between devices.

Microchip’s recently developed UNI/O bus gives designers more flexibility when designing applications that require external memory.

The UNI/O microcontroller technology has been recently released by Microchip. It consists of a proprietary single I/O bus protocol, where the bus combines the clock and data lines into a single bit stream using the Manchester Encoding technique. Since Microchip already is one of the leading microcontroller and memory devices it is likely that the near future will see an increased use of this pin saving technology.