Serial NOR Flash memory use is on the rise. With its lower system cost due to controller pin-count reduction, smaller and simpler PCBs, switching noise reduction, and lower power consumption, Serial NOR Flash solutions are offering several benefits over parallel Flash memories.
A transition to serial NOR Flash from parallel does come at the price of reduced performance. For applications that have switched from the parallel interface to standard serial interface, read performance of the memory declines by 50% to 70% (typical 90ns parallel Flash memory in byte or word mode, compared to the SPI Flash memory running at 50MHz in single I/O mode).
Now, with the performance improvements provided by multi-I/O functionality, design engineers can bring the benefits of a lower cost serial NOR Flash memory subsystem to new applications while maintaining similar levels of performance. In the video below, Bob France, VP of Customer Engineering at Spansion, demonstrates the improvements quad I/O mode provides over standard single I/O operation using a Freescale i.MX28 evaluation platform.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=17zufHbIfNo]