Technology is Racing Inside the Car

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Fely Krewell

Time flies. I can’t believe it is almost the end of the year already. For many, that means the shock of holiday shopping starts to set in, but for me, it is time to start watching the parade of announcements from the automakers as they roll out new models and announce their latest technology breakthroughs. TV commercials, magazines, social media and of course, the car shows, will all be a buzz about the newest must-have features and 2012 models.

I work closely with many of the major auto companies in my role at Spansion so I get to see what’s coming before most. Some of the trends that you will hear a lot more about over the coming months are advanced applications of Bluetooth, cloud-connected electronics and advanced safety systems.

I personally am most excited with what’s happening behind the steering wheel. The dashboard is undergoing a major upgrade. Your classic speedometer, odometer, warning signals, known as the instrument cluster, is moving to TFT (thin film transistor) displays. The mechanical gauges are going digital. We’ve already seen the change in some luxury cars but it is making its way into mainstream vehicles.

Riding the Smartphone and Tablet Wave

Thanks to the proliferation of smart phones and tablets, the price of TFT displays has dropped significantly over the last couple years. The affordability of displays has allowed the automakers to use them more widely within the car and throughout their product line. It is no longer a luxury for the auto elite.

I’m excited about TFTs, not because of the “cool factor,” but for safety. The screen will provide important data to enable safer and smarter driving. The information will be the most relevant data depending on the driving environment or health status of the car. It will be a smart display that knows what to tell you and when. It will have to support rich graphics, 3D imagery, multi-languages, and even high resolution video.

Bringing High Technology Mainstream

Advances in automotive electronics will make the roads a safer place, but only to the degree the technology proliferates throughout all car segments. Collectively the industry needs to optimize systems to make it affordable.

Spansion is doing its part by focusing on the memory subsystem with our chipset partners. Our newly announced Spansion® FL-S family is great example of this. We are using the low pin count serial interface to strip out complexity in the printed circuit board, simplifying the connections to the microcontroller. And by delivering a high-performance double data rate serial Flash memory that is capable of 66 MB/s reads, automotive designers can simplify designs further by removing DRAM altogether in the TFT display and execute and render graphics directly from the Spansion FL-S memory.

It is innovation like this that is needed to advance the start of the art, affordably, so it can reach the masses. I’m very excited to see the new crop of cars that are coming in 2012 and the coming years.

The LA Auto Show is right around the corner, November 18-27. All of the latest advancements and a look into the future will be on display. I’ll be watching all the excitement and will share my thoughts with you after the event.

Set Top Box: The Center of Your Viewing World

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Susie Gao

The Set Top Box (STB) is the center of your viewing world delivering premium content and services to you through a variety of broadcasting mediums (Satellite, Cable, Terrestrial, IP). Consumers are demanding media-rich home entertainment requiring STB evolution to include more advanced features and services and driving an architecture for faster performance, scalability and security.

More than just ABC/CBS/NBC with a Remote

In a Digital TV (DTV) system, a Set Top Box receives, filters and processes all the content and services accessed by the TV viewer. Evolving from a simple Standard Definition device that offered a basic Electronic Program Guide (EPG) information and access to a limited set of services and content, newer STBs support:

High definition channels
Multi-tuner capabilities (enabling simultaneous viewing and recording)
IPTV in addition to broadcast TV
Pay per view/video on demand services
Internet interactivity

STBs are also increasingly assuming the functions of home gateway or home server devices that can store as well as distribute content to many TVs, PCs and portable devices throughout different rooms inside the home.

Give me Access to that Content

Increasingly, consumers want access to the content on their terms: on-demand and on this device. While everyone would love to get the content for free, normally access comes at a cost. Consequently, both the consumer and the pay-TV operator must rely on the STB to be the platform for secure transactions and content protection.

For consumers wanting privacy and content providers wanting to protect their revenue stream, security within the STB is critical and falls in two areas:

Conditional access systems (CAS) – Securing the content as it is delivered from the operator to the STB by ensuring that consumers can only play content to which they are entitled. The overall user entitlement process is handled by the conditional access kernel (CAK) and a conditional access module – often contained in a SmartCard- inside the STB.
DRM (digital rights management) – Protecting the content as it is stored in the STB or shared with other devices and users through a home network such as WiFi. The DRM technology is typically handled by the middleware software and therefore needs to be secured from hacking as well.

NOR flash provides a key role

NOR Flash contains the boot code, CA kernel, operating system kernel, device drivers, middleware and the EPG. The boot code and the operating system code require high random read performance and data retention making NOR flash the ideal non-volatile memory solution, directly impact the viewing experience by providing a near “Instant On” experience so they can access their desired programs quickly. Unlike other consumer electronic systems, TV operators actively manage the STB once it has been supplied to the consumer. Higher-density NOR flash memory can be provisioned for future software additions or upgrades.

In providing security in the STB, NOR Flash is particularly important. To secure the CA kernel, the OS and the middleware codes, the NOR flash contains security features such as permanent lockable region to protect against write or erase access by hackers and pirates and a One Time Programmable (OTP) region for sensitive data such as encryption keys and unique IDs.

Spansion’s 65nm NOR products Family offer features that address the STB’s performance, scalability, performance and total cost of ownership. The Spansion® GL-S family is the latest generation of Parallel NOR products that have been well established in the STB market for many years, and Spansion Serial NOR products have ramped up quickly in STB applications since 2010 because of its reduced pin count which simplifies board layout and results in lower system costs and reduces the form factor of many embedded designs. The latest generation of Serial flash, Spansion FL-S family, brings high performance benefits to simplified memory interface.

Introducing Spansion® FL-S SPI family: Your New Four-Lane Superhighway

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Ajay Bhatia

You’ll get no arguments from me. I love driving my car on an open, six-lane superhighway. With speed limits in the US of upwards of 80MPH, you can quickly get from point A to point B. However, that huge superhighway comes with a cost; it takes up a lot of real estate, it is costly to build, and it is sometimes overkill for the job at hand. Sometimes, a smaller superhighway is simply perfect as the solution.

In the world of NOR Flash memory, Parallel NOR has quite effectively provided the “six-lane superhighway” for embedded system applications, with quick data delivery to and from the memory and the microcontroller (MCU). In contrast, NOR solutions using the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) have been more akin to a dirt road. However, with new innovations in DDR SPI, Spansion has transformed SPI NOR into a four-lane superhighway and increased the speed limit substantially.

Parallel vs. Serial Bus Architectures

System developers must make design choices between parallel bus architecture for more bandwidth and serial bus architecture for lower pin count. While the performance of Parallel NOR is still required for many applications, each I/O pin at the CPU and memory interface adds to the overall system cost. As a result, some hardware system designs are migrating to alternate complex code execution models with optimized pin count solutions.

Regardless of Parallel or Serial, the ultimate NOR advantage is real-time code execution for an enhanced end-user experience. This implies a suitability toward high read bandwidth and low data access latency. One of the increasing advantages of SPI is the growing number of chipsets and microcontrollers that support the interface. Recently the market has moved to multi-input output (MIO) functionality to create x2 and x4 interfaces that provide high performance at an optimal system overhead.

Introducing Spansion® FL-S SPI family – 66MB/s, 1Gb of storage and only a 16-pin SIOC package

Our newly-released Spansion FL-S family leads the industry in performance with a 20% increase in read speed combined with a 3X boost in programming time. Moreover, the product line supports up to 1Gb for greater applicability in automotive instrument clusters, digital TVs, set-top boxes and industrial designs.

By implementing an innovative Double Data Rate (DDR) bus on a Serial interface, the SPI NOR read performance is increased up to 66 MB/s for faster execute in place (XiP) operation. All this functionality sits in an industry-standard 16-pin SO package with an active signal count of 6 pins. This provides a throughput of 11MB /s per active signal pin.

Speed improvements also translate into operational cost savings. A 1.5 MB/s programming speed reduces system cost and increases throughput by 300% over the nearest competing solution. Lastly, the new family has expanded security options to protect customer IP through a 1kB one-time programmable (OTP) region, individual sector protection, and advanced data protection.

Rich User Experiences with More Affordable Designs

By offering high performance and high density, SPI Flash can become the mainstream choice for low-power MCUs. Bypassing the need for any additional memory within the MCU, a system designer can expose the SPI Flash in the main memory map and treat it like on-chip Flash, maximizing performance and throughput.

Additionally, performance intensive LCD images can stream from the Flash and even raster directly– all from a very pin-efficient footprint provided by SPI NOR. And with a storage density of 1Gb, the system can scale to handle more comprehensive vector engines for realistic graphics.

With the competing pressures of increased functionality and performance at a lower system cost driving requirements in the embedded application space, architects and designers are forced to choose and establish trade-offs. Now, with the DDR SPI performance and 1Gb density scalability announced with the newly released Spansion FL-S family, SPI Flash may have just become your new four-lane superhighway.

File Systems on Flash

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Max Willis

For all new technology devices, whether it is the latest consumer device or a new driver-assist feature in an automobile or a next-generation telecommunications component, the end-user will always ask, “What is in it for me?” More often than not, that means innovative software that unleashes the potential, raw power of the hardware.

Applications Driving Component Designs

Today’s designers are faced with the ongoing challenge of creating more complex designs in less time without sacrificing performance or increasing costs. They are looking to their suppliers to wrap value-added software around their hardware to help them meet that challenge. In fact, applications are truly driving the entire ecosystem.

To meet this goal, we introduced Spansion® FFS™ Flash File System software, customized to support both parallel and serial flash memories. With this flexible software solution, you can rapidly create a full-featured data storage subsystem where a universal interface of a block driver isolates the command interface of the Flash memory from your software application.

Removing Complexity From Your Design

At the heart of the Spansion FFS package is the Spansion Block Driver (BD) and the Low Level Driver (LLD). The Spansion BD maps logical blocks to physical blocks for you, automatically managing dirty space cleanup, wear leveling, and power failure recovery. Supporting both serial and parallel interfaces, the Low Level Driver contains all of the device-specific logic to manage the Flash command presentation and Flash status.

The Spansion FFS package completes the data storage abstraction by also including the Spansion File System (FS) – useful if your system has no disk file system or if you want to integrate your application directly with Spansion FS. Additionally, OS Bindings are provided for Linux and Windows CE, enabling rapid integration of Spansion BD into your preferred OS, so your applications can continue to use the file system interface provided by your OS.

And we have made it easy to license and procure. The Spansion FFS has a click-thru license that enables easy evaluation and acceptance and is available at no cost to all Spansion customers. You receive full source code, user guide and porting guide.

Committed to Meeting Your Needs

Spansion recognizes that the challenges of embedded systems designs are changing. We are committed to meeting your needs not only by delivering the most powerful hardware solutions, but also the software to unleash its full potential. We are dedicated to providing a complete Flash solution to manage your changing design needs leveraging our full roadmap, now and into the future.

Intelligent Management for the Photovoltaic Network

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Winnie Wu

When one thinks of photovoltaic (PV) energy, one cannot help but think about the Sun as the ubiquitous, renewable source of the energy. However, I also like to think about the Mississippi River. What do I mean by that? The energy network with its utility grid is very similar to a water system with its reservoirs, dams and rivers. PV energy is becoming an increasing important contributor to this energy network.

Managing the Flow

Electricity flows from the higher voltage point to the lower voltage point like water in a river. And as the water pressure decreases as users on the river consume the water, so does electricity voltage as users consume it. Moreover, like the myriad of dams, levees, bunds, and reservoirs used to control the level of water in the river, electrical equipment is used in similar fashions to manage the voltage level within certain ranges throughout its journey from the source to its consumers. Situations like overvoltage and undervoltage can lead to serious problems with electronic machinery and consumer appliances.

So what does this mean for PV energy? Well, energy companies have more than 130 years experience managing the centralized energy generation at coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydroelectric and petroleum power plants. And they are reasonably successful at transmitting this electricity from the centralized source to the distributed consumption albeit with substantial energy loss. In fact, most initial deployments of alternative energy power plants are similarly placed on the grid.

However, PV energy has the potential to be generated where the consumption occurs, even in densely populated urban areas. Given the amount of energy lost during its transmission, this is very appealing and critical to the return-on-investment of PV solutions. To maximize the PV systems efficiency at these distributed locations, they need to be intelligently monitored to understand the impact of shadows, contaminants and positioning of the solar panels. Environmental conditions can change, pollution can settle and trees will grow; all of these can affect the amount of sunlight hitting the panel and its subsequent effectiveness.

Unpredictability is Bad

As mentioned before, overvoltage or undervoltage is definitely not a good thing and can limit the urban adoption of PV energy. Overvoltage can shorten the lifetime of equipment like transformers that supply the power and undervoltage limits the normal operation of electrical equipment and consumer appliances. With multiple PV systems providing energy onto the grid, the challenge to properly manage the voltage levels becomes paramount.

Also, there are other situations that need proper management. For example, if multiple PV systems are simultaneously brought off the grid at the same time, it could lead to a precipitous voltage drop if not adequately compensated for by the main grid. What about the opposite? If PV systems in a network are cut off from the main grid but yet delivering energy, safety issues could exist for maintenance personnel coming to fix the problem. Finally, there is a lot of conditioning of the electricity that needs to be done to maintain a solid network.

Consequently, PV systems must have sufficient intelligence to monitor itself, identify issues, act on those issues and notify a centralized location. These features and the associated equipment require the capabilities of Spansion^® NOR flash as part of the solution. Cost-effectiveness, ability to operate in extreme conditions and long lifespan (10+ years) are critical to the profitable success of the PV solutions. Spansion Flash solutions are designed specifically to address the needs of these mission-critical embedded environments.

Gaming Graphics Get More Flashy

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Avo Kanadjian

About 5 months ago, a very interesting point-and-click adventure game called Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP was released for the Apple iPad. Was it because it has outstanding, immersive gameplay? No, it was released with incredible 8-bit visuals, challenging puzzles and an awesome soundtrack. Indeed, it was quite different than the predominate trend in gaming: more realistic and more immersive interactive graphics.

From Casual Handheld to Professional Simulations

The push for more action and realism is driving higher requirements for performance and capacity in NOR memory within embedded devices from simple handheld gaming devices to high-end professional games and simulations. One can say that “the flashiness of the game is driving the flashiness in the system” – all pun intended!

Three key memory characteristics are critical to graphics processing in these systems: data throughput, initial response times and total storage capacity. Unfortunately, balancing these tradeoffs against one another is a tricky proposition. Without superior data throughput, the gaming experience would be lost as jittery graphics would destroy the illusion; yet, fast initial response times are needed to handle fast random reads due to the interactivity of the gameplay. Traditionally, NOR Flash has handled these requirements quite well. High performance is enabled through burst mode and simultaneous read/write operations for fast boot and quick application loading.

The drive for greater, more comprehensive realism has also increased capacity requirements. When one thinks of higher capacity requirements and flash memory, one immediately thinks of solid-state disks (SSDs). Undoubtedly, SSDs are driving the limit for higher capacity with NAND flash devices and will continue for the foreseeable future. NAND Flash (64Gbit) clearly can scale to larger densities than NOR flash (now 4Gbit), but with the cost of a significant impact on initial access times due to NAND’s parallel configuration of multiplexed address and data buses. However, the push for higher capacity combined with superior performance is creating demand for another growth segment in the market, high-density NOR.

Spansion recently introduced the industry’s first 4Gb NOR Flash at 65nm. Built for speed, the chip has fast random read for interactive operation, fast programming for time efficient software development, and very high reliability for long-term operation. With these types of advancements, dual requirements of performance and capacity are best delivered by high-density NOR; particularly for 2D and 3D graphics, animation and video used in games, learning devices and automotive infotainment and instrumentation clusters.