ABSTRACT
The ash memory was conceived as a functional improvement of the erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM), which was invented in the 1980s from the initial idea of Frohman-Bentchkowsky [1]. The EPROM memory electrically programmed and erased by ultraviolet (UV) irradiation became the most important nonvolatile memory (NVM) application in the 1980s. The ash memory, called ash because the whole memory array is erased at the same time, introduced the advantages of the electrical erase as well as the possibility to reprogram the read only memory in situ, with no need of removing it from the system [2,3].
