NAND Flash Controller Targets Processors Without Native Interfaces

QuickLogic Corp. has extended its storage solution portfolio from hard disk drives and SD Card memory to raw NAND flash with the addition of a full-featured NAND flash memory controller solution for the company’s ultra-low-power PolarPro and Eclipse II programmable logic families. The solution is designed to allow fast adoption of NAND flash into portable systems with application processors that do not have native support for NAND flash, such as the Marvel PXA2xx and Analog Devices Blackfin DSP family. According to QuickLogic, providing the controller functionality in silicon offers higher system performance and much lower CPU usage than software-based alternatives do.

The implementation can operate with as little as 20 mA at 1.8 V and can provide throughput as fast as 12 Mbytes/s while reading and 10 Mbytes/s while writing. The solution supports automatic 1-bit error correction, 2-bit error detection, hardware sector buffering, marking of bad blocks, and registers for implementation of wear-leveling algorithms. It permits glueless connectivity to the application processor, using a 16- or 32-bit local bus, and handles one x8 flash device or two x8 devices in parallel. Both large- and small-block flash devices from leading flash vendors, such as Samsung and Toshiba, may be used with the NAND flash solution. Software drivers are available for both Linux and WinCE.