August 2012, At the Flash Memory Summit we had a chance to talk to Jeff Bader of Micron about their directions and offerings for the embedded Flash space. Unlike the consumer external Flash memory solutions which are high capacity, low duty cycle and short lifetime products, dominated by NAND, the embedded space has different criteria. The automotive, industrial control, settop box and TV marketplace are all seeking a minium 10yr product life cycle for all memory NOR/NAND flash and DRAM.
The main flash application for these products is as firmware and operational programming rather than dynamic content storage. While the IPTV box market is starting to look at NAND based boot architectures, the majority use traditional NOR devices with an eMMC interface and reduced pin count on an SPI interface. The high speed and compact size of programming is what has drawn the Digital TV market to NOR Flash where there is system control and the dynamic program store is limited to user selected features and programming guides. This is similar in application to the Settop Box applications.
New expansion markets are the pico-projectors and projector market that are supporting multiple language menus for their GUI and the enhanced use in automotive for both in-cabin infotainment control (not for content which is NAND dominated, but function store) and system control of driver assistance devices.
The SPI NOR interface and its low duty cycle with long product life makes the technology highly reliable and optimized for the IOT and M2M marketplace in both commercial and industrial applications. These health care and home automation products average 7-10 yrs of installation life with memory requirements under 1Gb.
The NOR marketplace is fully supported for embedded design with chipsets, design kits, reference designs, programming kits, and FPGA based systems design boards. Long established software development kits on multiple OSs are available to support the design for all the NOR interfaces and top level applications. These kits and products are available directly from Micron and from their distribution partners for single product sales and for multiple product networking and industrial control applications.