What is Cmos? Is it only a part of Bios?

[mnandadulal]

I am actually very confused about the functions of cmos in Bios. Is it only do the function of time or anything more?

[Banfa]

No CMOS is a technology for producing low power integrated circuits (ICs or chips).

CMOS stands for "Complement ary metal–oxide–sem iconductor"

CMOS

Where as BIOS is the low level software that runs on your PC to enable the different components of your PC to communicate.

BIOS stands for "Basic Input Output System"

BIOS


They are in no way related.

[Henry Yiu]

Often the BIOS and CMOS can be confused because instructions may either indicate to enter the BIOS Setup or the CMOS Setup. Although the setup for BIOS / CMOS is the same, the BIOS and CMOS on the motherboard are not.

If you have already read the above BIOS and CMOS definition links you should now know that the BIOS and CMOS are two different components on the motherboard. The BIOS on the motherboard contains the instructions on how the computer boots and is only modified or updated with BIOS updates, the CMOS is powered by a CMOS battery and contains your system settings and is modified and changed by entering the CMOS Setup.

Although the setup is often referred to as the BIOS and CMOS setup, we suggest you only refer to the setup as "CMOS Setup" as it is more appropriate. Computer Hope often refers to the setup as BIOS and CMOS Setup to help users who are looking for one instead of the other.

From: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000707.htm

[tyagithehacker]

Even though the defination of BIOS and CMOS given above is perfectly right, i do not agree that there is no relation between CMOS and BIOS. both are closely related as BIOS instruction (a small low level software) are written over ROM chip, and this ROM chip is CMOS chip.

thus one can say that CMOS chip (a chip that implements CMOS technology) is just a hardware component , on which BIOS instructions are stored.