 Serial Flash is Revolutionizing the NOR Flash Market. Atmel pioneered the SPI serial Flash market when it introduced its full-featured DataFlash® family back in March 1997. System designers hailed it as ground-breaking and quickly adopted the cost-saving solution. Atmel has maintained its leadership position through continued innovation and by consistently addressing the system-level needs of various end-market applications. Atmel's serial DataFlash product offering is now comprised of two families: the high-speed, uniform small block erase AT25F/DFxxxx series and the flagship AT45DBxxxx series of high-speed, page-erasable, and byte-alterable devices.
With the largest portfolio of devices in the industry and with all available in 8-pin packages, Atmel's serial products have the right densities and features to enable your application to do more with a smaller footprint at the
right price.
As the industry transition from parallel Flash to serial Flash accelerates, so has the need for more advanced features in the serial Flash devices themselves. Now Atmel is bringing all the features of the parallel NOR Flash world to the 8-pin serial Flash world, starting with the Atmel authored JEDEC standard for Manufacturer and Device ID for serial memory devices.
In addition, the latest generation devices in the AT45DBxxxx family feature a 128-byte security register that includes a unique 64-byte number in every device. Enhanced sector protection is also provided to protect code and data individually on a sector-by-sector basis, allowing applications to safely store boot code in either the top or the bottom portion of the memory array. To take system security to a whole new level, a new lockdown feature has been incorporated to allow any combination of sectors to be permanently made read only (ROM). Designers can now securely and permanently lockdown a boot area or specific sector anywhere within the device sector map and never again worry about unwanted code corruption. With clock rates up to 70 MHz and minimized command overhead, system designers can now implement direct linear execution from serial Flash and eliminate the shadow RAM.
Atmel's serial devices are the ideal memory solution to help reduce total system costs. The simple 4-wire SPI interface and space saving 8-pin packaging greatly reduce system pin counts and board space as compared to those implemented with traditional parallel Flash devices. Using serial Flash eliminates the need for parallel address and data lines, netting a significant pin-count reduction (28 to 48 fewer pins depending on the memory density). The numerous benefits of a serial Flash system architecture also include simplified routing, reduced switching noise, smaller system footprint, improved system reliability, reduced manufacturing complexity, reduced ASIC pin counts and, of course, reduced system costs.
The AT25F/DFxxxx series of products are pin compatible to our complete offering of AT25xxxx SPI serial EEPROM products. This gives the flexibility of increasing the memory density from a 1Kbit low-density serial EEPROM device to a 64Mbit+ serial Flash without any changes to your board layout.
Serial Flash is the next generation memory product of choice for the cost and performance concious designers.
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