Early in my career I worked for a start-up software company, Maxager, which was trying to change the profitability of asset-intensive manufacturers by analyzing profit in a new way. We didn’t determine profitability based on GAAP-based profit per unit, but on profit per minute. We discovered that products once thought to be stars based on standard gross margin, where actually dogs because it consumed valuable time on the production floor. The genesis of the software was steeped in the Theory of Constraints, a concept written about in the book The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. So Who’s Herbie and what does he have to do with NOR Flash?
The Goal is a fictional account of a plant manager, Alex, who is tasked with making his factory profitable and efficient. After many starts and stops and a very interesting analysis of a Boy Scout hike featuring Herbie – the slowest scout, Alex comes to realize that the final throughput of the factory is determined by the rate of the slowest operation in the sequence (“the Herbie”).
You Have to Program the NOR Flash At Least Once
So what does this have to do with NOR Flash? NOR Flash, whether parallel or serial, will store software that runs an embedded system. At some point in the manufacturing process, it will be programmed at least once if not multiple times and maybe more when the final product is put into service. So the speed at which you can program the Flash memory is an important factor when selecting a device and ultimately contributes to the profitability of your products. You need to optimize the programming step in the manufacturing process to ensure that it has sufficient capacity to be close to the required demand.
Notice that the flow is balanced with demand, not capacity. If the programming step becomes the bottleneck in the manufacturing process, an hour lost there is an hour lost by the entire system. It will be the place where valuable inventory builds up and, if the manufacturing line is not optimized, will cause excessive inventory in other locations of the factory until programmed chips can be completed.
3X Faster Programming Speeds
Programming speed is critical to address this concern. For example, Spansion® FL-S serial Flash memory and Spansion GL-S parallel Flash memory have a programming speed of 1.5Mbytes per sec. It is 3x faster than the closest competing devices in the industry.
With up to one third of the programming time of its competitors, the Spansion FL-S and GL-S Flash memories are much less likely to become “the Herbie” in the manufacturing process, can enhance the throughput in a balanced manufacturing environment and/or reduce the costs in the programming step by requiring less programming stations.
While pin count, performance and capacity may be on the top of your mind when selecting a NOR Flash product to put into your embedded system, don’t forget that the product needs to be built with profit in mind and faster programming speeds can also help reduce the indirect costs of making the product.
It is interesting to find myself working for another company that’s innovating in a way that will help boost our customer’s profitability.