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firmware

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Acronyms, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.02 sec.

firmware

A category of memory chips that hold their content without electrical power. Firmware includes rewritable flash memory and EEPROM, reprogrammable PROM and EPROM and read-only ROM technologies. Early firmware chips were low capacity and costly and used only to hold instructions and settings, especially in portable devices. In addition, the content stored in the first chips really was "firm," either read-only (permanent) or reprogrammable with difficulty (see ROM, PROM and EPROM).

Flash memory, the most common firmware, is rewritable, and used like a computer's hard disk. Today's portable devices use gigabytes of flash memory for songs, photos and videos as well as software applications. See memory, flash memory and FOTA.

Firmware - Software stored in read-only memory (ROM) or programmable ROM (PROM). Easier to change than hardware but harder than software stored on disk. Firmware is often responsible for the behaviour of a system when it is first switched on. A typical example would be a "monitor" program in a microcomputer which loads the full operating system from disk or from a network and then passes control to it.


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NASDAQ: SSTI), a leader in flash memory technology, today reinforced its position as the leading independent supplier of Firmware Hub (FWH) devices by ramping production of its 8 Mbit Firmware Hub product.
SST RAMPS PRODUCTION OF 8 MBIT FIRMWARE HUB DEVICE FOR INTEL ... by EDP Weekly's IT Monitor
The companies will use the Phoenix solution as the firmware foundation for their upcoming laptop computer products.
Phoenix Technologies Announces Five Design Wins With Top Notebook ... by Business Wire
Nasdaq:SSTI) has announced that it has become the industry's largest independent supplier of Firmware Hub devices for Internet computing systems using Intel's 800 Series Hub Architecture chipsets.
SST BECOMES LEADING INDEPENDENT SUPPLIER OF FIRMWARE HUB DEVICES by EDP Weekly's IT Monitor
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