8Kbit Microwire EEPROM in SOT-23-6
The Microchip 93LC76BT-I/OT is an 8Kbit serial EEPROM organized as 512 x 16 bits, accessed through a 3 MHz Microwire synchronous serial interface. The SOT-23-6 package keeps the footprint small — six pins for the bus, power, and ground — which suits space-constrained designs where an I2C part would need pull-up resistors on the same board area. The industrial temperature range from -40°C to 85°C means it can sit on a motor-drive control board or an outdoor sensor node without a grade bump.
Microwire vs I2C — the interface trade-off
The 3 MHz clock rate on the Microwire bus gives a raw serial throughput of 3 Mbit/s — faster than the 1 MHz ceiling of a typical I2C EEPROM like the AT24C08D-SSHM-B. The trade-off is that Microwire uses a dedicated chip-select line per device, so a multi-device bus consumes one GPIO per EEPROM, whereas I2C shares two wires across 8 devices with address pins. Write-cycle time is 5 ms for a word or a page — the same as most I2C serial EEPROMs in this density class. The 512 x 16 organization means the host reads and writes 16-bit words natively; if the MCU expects byte-wide access, the firmware must handle the word alignment.
The Tape & Reel packaging (cut tape also available) aligns with automated pick-and-place assembly.