There is one drawback to building products with the first generation MSP430FR57xx, and that is that it cannot be programmed and then sent through reflow or soldering. The high temperature of 260°C for about 2 minutes would cause a small number of bits to become unreliable due thermal characteristics eroding the polar margin in the FRAM molecules. This is also known as “thermal depolarization” and is not allowable in many applications where FRAM would be used as both readable and writeable memory. Any activity where these types of temperatures occur after programming should be avoided. Programming can easily be completed by in circuit testers, flying probes, production board level programmers, and even serial bootstrap loader interfaces. In addition, there are many other ways to program these devices after they have been soldered onto the board. There is no problem with this method, as successfully writing the memory even once after the soldering will reset the memory to behave like the thermal exposure never happened. Finally, this behavior has been resolved in future generations of MSP430 FRAM parts after the initial MSP430FR57xx family. Reflow soldering should not be a problem for devices released in 2012 and beyond.