I am working identifying a problem in a VFD for a friend’s belt grinder, and I’ve ID’d the other ICs on but, but I wasn’t able to ID this last 8-pin one. I know it’s made by Microchip, but couldn’t pull anything up from the codes on the front.
It’s possible this is an encryption key chip with some obfuscated info on the front. However, I don’t know how common that actually is.
Any help is appreciated.
UPDATE: Looks like this one’s solved. I went back and double-checked the code, and it looks like y’all were correct on it being ‘4A08I’ and not ‘4A081’. This chip is also the closest IC to the MCU which lines up perfectly with this being an EEPROM.
I appreciate everyone’s input and help with this!


So I think the answer was found by a couple of the others, but I will still follow through with other photos.
Here’s a (if only slightly) clearer image of the IC code
And here is a zoomed-out shot of the entire board. You can see the tiny IC in question to the left of the MCU with the ‘56/1.10’ sticker on it.
Great photo! Clearly two eights and an I. And the proximity to the MCU corroborates the EEPROM theory.