We’ve all been there. It is going to be one of those big days at work and you are hurrying to get to the next meeting. As you are about to leave your office you click the button to print your presentation. You rush to the nearby printer only to find it still waking up from sleep and then the panic sets in. Truly not the best way to be mentally prepared for your upcoming meeting.
Multi-Function Means Greater Requirements
While putting printers to sleep is a great way to save energy, consumers today want instant-on capabilities to avoid this exact situation. Innovations in the fuser modules have reduced the wait time to the first printed page to a matter of seconds. Also, these multi-function printers (MFP) are expanding their utilities to include color management, copying, scanning, faxing, advanced networking and internet access.
Truly, today’s MFPs are much more sophisticated than the initial days of dot-matrix personal printers. This intelligence puts demands on the electronics inside the printer to do more, including high speed printing, faster boot times, more sophisticated software and therefore higher density non-volatile memory (NVM). In order to balance the competing requirements, design engineers depend on high performance NOR flash memory to provide storage for the advanced software.
Meeting the Challenge
For example, our Spansion® GL-S Flash memory family was designed specifically for fast data access, interactivity and boot performance. It includes multiple storage densities of 128-Mbit, 256-Mbit, 512-Mbit and 1-Gbit to support a wide platform of electronic designs. The family’s page read performance is 45% faster versus other competitive products. The read performance not only enables a fast boot experience but it also can save overall system power as it reduces the time for information transfer out of the chip.
In what ways can you leverage this idea for success with your next design?