EDN's 18th Annual Innovation Awards Finalists
-- EDN, February 1, 2008
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&& PREVIOUS FINALIST | MAIN | NEXT FINALIST >> Category: Digital ICs, Memory, and Programmable Logic WINNER: All-In-OneMemory (SST)  NAND memory touts the highest silicon efficiency, leading to the lowest cost per bit, but it does not provide the fast random access necessary for direct code execution. EPROM-derived NOR, on the other hand, can directly execute code but costs more per bit than NAND. These fundamental differences have driven the parallel adoption and evolution of NOR and NAND flash memory for more than 20 years. System designers have long desired an all-in-one flash memory technology, for board-space savings, simplicity, and other reasons, but the functional disparities between NOR and NAND have generally thwarted those plans—until now, that is.SST’s NAND-based All-in-OneMemory also includes 4 Mbytes of PSRAM (pseudo SRAM) in the initial SST88VP1107 member of the product family. The PSRAM acts as a directly executing cache. Caching the NAND contents extends flash-memory endurance and improves reliability by minimizing direct read/write-access cycles. The cache’s demand-paging scheme also eliminates the need for shadowing the OS and application code, thus reducing the amount of required system RAM. The SST88VP1007 provides 512 kbytes of instant-on boot NOR-flash memory, 128 Mbytes of XIP (execute-in-place) code storage, 120 Mbytes of data storage, and 12 Mbytes of system RAM. |
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