Total Endurance™
Quick Start Guide
Total Endurance™ v5.00 Quick Start Guide
INTRODUCTION
Total Endurance software is a simple-to-use, yet powerful, software tool to help system
designers determine the endurance of Microchip EEPROMs in a given application. The
software will calculate the expected endurance based on the conditions entered by the
user.
INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE
You can find Total Endurance v5.00 on Microchip’s web site, www.microchip.com.
When you have downloaded Total Endurance v5.00 Install.exe, simply launch the
setup file and follow the instructions.
USING TOTAL ENDURANCE
There are four main parts of the screen: (See screen sample)
Options
The options area allows you to choose whether or not you want to calculate endurance
up to a specific period of time (“Application life”) or if you want the Total Endurance soft-
ware to calculate how long it will take to get to a specific failure rate (PPM). If it takes
longer than 41 years to get to the failure rate you have specified, then the program will
calculate out to 41 years and then display the actual failure rate at that time.
You can also select the x-axis display of the graph – either “Cycles” or “Time”.
Endurance Parameters
Here the parameters are entered that the Total Endurance software will use to calculate
the expected failure rate. Select the device you want using the “Product Family” and
“Device Selection” drop-down menus.
Next, select the operating voltage of your application (the VDD supply level of the
EEPROM), and the ambient temperature of the application (temperature has a strong
effect on endurance).
Depending on what you selected in options, you can enter the application life (or PPM
level) you need the Total Endurance software to calculate.
Select the String length (number of bytes being written during the Write command, use
1 for byte writes). And finally, the number of times those bytes are written per day.
Numerical Results
This area provides the results of your calculation in numerical form. It shows the failure
rate in FITs (Failure in Time) and PPM (Parts Per Million), calculates the MTBF (Mean
Time Between Failure), gives the life of the application (calculated if you have asked
Total Endurance software to calculate up to a certain PPM failure rate), and calculates
the number of write cycles you are performing over the life of your application.
© 2011 Microchip Technology Inc.
DS51342B-page 3
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