Today's system designers must continually find new and creative
ways to increase performance yet reduce power, space and cost. Designers
of complex graphics and hard drive controllers were among the first
to take advantage of serial Flash. These high performance controllers
were originally downloading code from Parallel Flash memory to faster
RAM upon power-up. By replacing the Parallel Flash memory with a lower
pin-count Serial Flash device, significant system benefits were achieved.
Learn more about serial code
storage and the benefits of spiFlash memories.
Today, serial code storage is a trend that is gaining momentum. New
and diverse applications such as printers, wireless LANs, set-top boxes,
DVD drives, DSL cable modems and other applications are turning to devices
like spiFlash memories to reduce controller pin count, board space,
power consumption, noise, and overall system costs.
Beside serial code storage, spiFlash memories are suitable for data, text
and voice storage in many industrial, automotive and consumer applications.
They are also becoming a popular and cost effective alternative to FPGA
configuration PROMs. Additionally, with the SPI interface readily available
on popular microcontrollers and DSPs, interfacing to spiFlash memories
is simple.
Flash Memory 
