Spansion Inc. Announces Sampling of 90nm 256 Mb MirrorBit(R) SPI Multi-I/O Product

Spansion Inc., a Flash memory solutions provider, announced that it is sampling its 90nm 256 Megabits (Mb) MirrorBit Multi-I/O Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) Flash memory device to set-top box, digital TV and industrial design customers and chipset manufacturers.

The 256 Mb MirrorBit SPI Multi-I/O product meets the higher density serial memory requirement that new consumer and industrial applications demand and broadens Spansion (News - Alert)'s SPI portfolio, which already includes 32 Mb, 64 Mb and 128 Mb products that are shipping in volume production and supported by most chipsets. Spansion’s family of MirrorBit SPI Multi-I/O devices lowers costs, pin counts and delivers high performance.

This performance of up to 40MB/s (80 MHz per I/O in four-way mode) is more than 6 times the transfer rate of standard serial flash memories running at a clock rate of 50MHz, and makes the MirrorBit SPI Multi-I/O family capable of providing execute-in-place (XIP) capabilities for a variety of industrial and consumer electronics applications with performance that matches or in some cases exceeds conventional parallel I/O NOR Flash memory

'Our customers require higher-density SPI Flash to enable new applications and to provide improvements in performance,' said Avo Kanadjian, vice president of marketing at Spansion. 'Additionally, our implementation of the 32-bit addressing scheme for 256 Mb and higher density SPI products is gaining acceptance in the industry as the preferred solution.'

Multi-I/O serial devices support the option for single (one-bit data bus), dual (two-bit data bus) or quad (four-bit data bus) serial I/O data transmission from the same packaging and pins. The SPI product family offers more security features. It has a permanent sector lock security device that protects intellectual property and user data stored in the memory array from being changed after this command has been activated.

Spansion is currently sampling the 256 Mb MirrorBit SPI Multi-I/O product to customers and chipset manufacturers.  Package options include BGA to support enhanced security features for set-top-box designs, and the standard SOIC 16-pin package for consumer and industrial applications. Production quantities will be available in June 2010.