Beyond the benefits that have been discussed, FRAM also brings a new dimension of flexibility that that saves development time and money. Before FRAM, designers were limited by the amount of data and program memory available to them in an MCU. In a 16 kB Flash MCU, many devices top out at 2 kB of SRAM, which is not enough for a wide range of applications. In the second example shown on this slide, often engineers were forced to use external EEPROM for data logging in addition to the memory built into their MCU due to the write limitation of flash. As such, they paid the penalty in cost as well as board space consumed by an additional component. In the third example, if an engineer needed more than 2 kB of program memory (as in the first example), they were forced to purchase a more expensive MCU with as much as five times the amount of Flash they need. All three of these scenarios are less than ideal and costly. FRAM from TI solves these challenges by giving a completely new level of freedom for software developers. Engineers can essentially “slide the bar” as needed in software to partition data and program memory as needed. This allows for simpler inventory management (by not having to purchase EEPROM), lower cost of issuance/ownership (by not having to purchase 5x the Flash at a cost premium) and faster time to market if a customer needs to make modifications in their system requiring more data/program memory.