Hello Friends,
I have been regularly using serial eeproms such as the 24C04, 24C08 etc in most of my products, with no problems at all.

I all these designs, I usually read the EEPROM once during power up and store the retrieved data from eeprom to the data ram (xdata) in the microcontroller, and then use this data in my programs.

Since this wastes a lot of data ram, I thought of directly reading the eeprom in the program loops, which means the eeprom will be continously read as long as the product is powered up.

Will this wear out the eeprom cells? Does READ cycles in the eeprom have life time limits such as WRITE cycles?

I tried refering some old data books from ATMEL, searched this forum as well and searched the NET with no success.

I will be thankfull if someone can point me to some information.

Thanks,
John.