firmware

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.

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firmware [′fərm‚wer]

(computer science)

A computer program or instruction, such as a microprogram, used so often that it is stored in a read-only memory instead of being included in software; often used in computers that monitor production processes.

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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.