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Micron Technology, Inc. is announcing its new, faster NOR flash memory solution that is designed to revolutionize development of systems benefitting from “instant-on” performance. Such systems are becoming more and more prevalent in automotive, industrial and consumer devices.
With a new simplified lower pin count using as little as 11 active signals, Micron’s XTRMFlash significantly outperforms other industry NOR flash. XTRMFlash reduces pin counts by as much as 75% from other Parallel NOR flash currently available. This provides system designers with an ideal and fastest possible direct code execution NOR flash solution that enables higher performance, yet smaller form factor designs.
According to Richard De Caro, director of NOR flash for Micron’s Embedded Business Unit, “Micron is committed to continued innovation in NOR flash memory. We worked closely with our ecosystem partners and customers to understand their next-generation requirements for high-performance memory, and we have developed XTRMFlash memory as a result. XTRMFlash memory and the XTRMFlash interface have the potential to dramatically change the paradigm of the existing memory landscape by enabling a new category of high-performance and low pin count memory devices that can also extend beyond NOR Flash.”
It is Micron’s full intention that XTRMFlash and its interface become widely-adopted open standards. The value proposition that is XTRMFlash is already manifesting itself, as flash memory device producer Winbond Electronics has signed a license agreement to develop XTRMFlash-compatible solutions.
Syed S. Hussain, director of Flash Memory Marketing at Winbond Electronics Corporation America, observes that “Winbond is excited to join Micron with development of XTRMFlash-compatible solutions. With Winbond providing compatible XTRMFlash solutions, customers will have the confidence and peace-of-mind to design-in XTRMFlash and support the new interface.”
Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) NOR flash is already utilized in a broad range of applications for boot code execution, program code execution, and data storage. Micron recognized the need for XTRMFlash memory to be able to be backwards-compatible with SPI NOR flash, which allows customers to upgrade their designs with relative ease. XTRMFlash offers significantly improved performance as compared to traditional SPI and even Quad-SPI NOR flash, delivering random access times as quick as 83 nanoseconds (ns), and sequential byte reads as fast as 2.5ns. With sustained read throughput of 400MB/s, an entire 1GB XTRMFlash device can be read in a mere 0.3 seconds. Via XTRMFlash’s direct execute-in-place (XIP) operation and reduced pin count interface, circuit board space is freed up for other use or size reduction, and the need for code shadowing is able to be eliminated.
Micron’s XTRMFlash family will be offered in a number of voltage, package and density variations, and in both industrial and automotive temperature grades. Densities range from 128Mb to 2Gb, with samples currently available. You can read the Micron press release announcing XTRMFlash in its entirety here.
