Most supported motherboards will have a 32-pin, 600 mil wide DIP socket for a 5V flash chip. For these motherboards, the appropriate part number for the 8MB DoC Milennium is MD2800-D08. If your motherboard uses a 3.3V flash chip (you may be able to tell by looking up the part number on the chip that comes with your motherboard, and you will most likely have to peel back the BIOS authenticity sticker to see that number) then you probably need part number MD2800-D08-V3 instead. Contact your motherboard documentation and/or manufacturer's tech support to be certain. If your motherboard has a PLCC flash socket (these are smaller and have contacts on four sides rather than two) then adapting a DoC to your board will be more difficult and will likely require an adapter which will cost as much as many motherboards.

Part numbers with a "-X" suffix, e.g. MD2800-D08-X, are rated for extended, or "industrial" temperature operation — -40°C to +85°C — and will probably have around a US$10 price premium over the regular commercial-grade chips. While these are only really worth the extra expense if the motherboard itself is also rated for this range, they should in all other respects be identical to the parts without the "-X" suffix and thus may be substituted if the commercial-grade chips aren't available.

The DiskOnChip® products are manufactured by M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd.. In the US, there are currently (April 2001) four authorized distributers:

• Avnet Electronics Marketing
• EMJ Embedded Systems
• Tri-M Systems
• Reptron Electronics Inc.

Of these four, Avnet and EMJ offer online pricing and ordering. Avnet will sell in full-tube quantities only, meaning that you will need to purchase them in multiples of eleven units — at around US$36 per chip (early 2001 price). Thus, a minimum order will be around US$400. EMJ and Tri-M may sell in smaller quantities, check with their sales offices. For sales representitives, or for distribution sources outside the US, refer to M-Systems' distributer page.

Yes and no. Most moderately-priced device programmers such as the Needham's Electronics EMP-30 mentioned above will not be able to burn a DoC. At this point in time, only the products from BP Microsystems explicitly support the DoC Milennium. These are relatively expensive, however, so that for low-volume programming it is likely to be more cost-effective to simply add a ZIF socket to a standard PC motherboard and use that as a device programmer.

There are several manufacturers of ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) sockets for DIP packages. If you get ones that are designed for through-hole mounting on a printed circuit board, the pins on the bottom of the socket will probably fit in the pin socket on your motherboard. Thus, you should be able to pull the orignal flash chip, replace it with a ZIF socket and then put the flash chip or DoC in the ZIF socket.

One ZIF socket that has been used with some success is made by Aires, part number 32-6554-10. These are available from Digi-Key for about $10 each.