Winbond’s Interoperability of OctalNAND Flash with Synopsys DesignWare AMBA IP Delivers Complete High-Density NAND Flash Solution

By Taryn Engmark

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

July 22, 2021

News

Winbond’s Interoperability of OctalNAND Flash with Synopsys DesignWare AMBA IP Delivers Complete High-Density NAND Flash Solution

Flash optimizes data transfer rate with low latency for NAND with serial octal interface targeting automotive, mobile, and IoT SoCs

Winbond Electronics Corporation announced the successful interoperability of Synopsys’ DesignWare Synchronous Serial Interface (SSI) IP and Winbond’s OctalNAND Flash Memory. The DesignWare SSI IP enables faster adoption of octal NVM with high-speed read bandwidth in densities up to 4Gb.

As the world’s first x8 Octal interface NAND Flash, Winbond’s OctalNAND Flash enables automotive, communications, and industrial system manufacturers to provide cost effective embedded code storage in high density and in the same form factor as NOR Flash.

J.W. Park, technology executive of Winbond Flash Memory, said, “System makers using chipsets that incorporate both OctalNAND Flash and DesignWare SSI IP will be able to choose the most appropriate code storage flash available in the market, including SpiNOR Flash, QspiNAND Flash, or OctalNAND Flash, according to their performance, density, and price point objectives.”

OctalNAND Flash Advantages

As the majority of high-density embedded applications use flash for boot then code shadow into DRAM for execution, OctalNAND Flash has read throughput of 240Mbytes/s along with the ability to continuously read from the beginning to near the end of the flash memory space. While NAND devices can come with bad memory blocks, Winbond’s OctalNAND Flash comes with the block management look-up table feature that enables bad blocks to be mapped away and replaced with good blocks, thus enabling the host to maintain a contiguous address space and simplifying high speed code shadowing without the host having to skip around bad blocks.

Compared to NOR Flash, OctalNAND Flash is capable of erasing up to 400 times faster and programming up to 50 times faster. When a large section of the flash needs to be OTA (Over-the-Air) updated, moving from a NOR device to OctalNAND Flash can mean a reduction of erase/program time from nearly 10 minutes to less than one minute.

For more information, visit Winbond.