SST ENTERS SERIAL FLASH MEMORY ARENA.SST SST: see airplane. (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc In the late 1980s, Bing Yeh and his cofounder assembled a small team of engineers in a rented office on Apollo Way in Sunnyvale, Calif., to develop a new breed of nonvolatile memory technology—SuperFlash—for code or data storage in electronic systems and embedded memory for .)(Nasdaq:SSTI SSTI State Science & Technology Institute (Westerville, OH) SSTI Skin and Soft Tissue Infection SSTI Small Spacecraft Technology Initiative SSTI Skin and Skin Structure Infection SSTI Six Sigma Technical Institute ) has entered the application-specific serial flash memory market with the introduction of a new product family. SST's SPI (1) (Stateful Packet Inspection) See stateful inspection. (2) (Service Provider Interface) The programming interface for developing Windows drivers under WOSA. (serial peripheral interface (communications, hardware) Serial Peripheral Interface - (SPI) A serial interface in which a master device supplies clock pulses to exchanges data serially with a slave over two data wires (Master-Slave and Slave-Master). ) serial flash family will initially consist of three products: the SST45VF512, a 512 Kbit device, the SST45VF010, a 1 Mbit device, and the SST45VF020, a 2 Mbit device. All three products are based on SST's proprietary, high-performance SuperFlash technology and therefore feature many benefits over competing serial flash products on the market today. Serial flash memory uses a three-wire interface, thereby resulting in a lower pin-count, which is beneficial to applications requiring a small footprint, low-cost flash memory solution. SST's serial flash products utilize the industry standard SPI protocol and are in-system reprogrammable. Due to their low power consumption and small footprint, SST's serial flash products offer ideal code storage solutions in battery-powered applications such as micro disk drives, smart cards Example of widely used contactless smart cards are Hong Kong's Octopus card, Paris' Calypso/Navigo card and Lisbon' LisboaViva card, which predate the ISO/IEC 14443 standard. The following tables list smart cards used for public transportation and other electronic purse applications. , MP3 players, cordless telephones, Bluetooth modules and GPS modules. SST's serial flash products are also targeted towards industrial applications such as medical monitors, handheld terminals, bar code readers and certain automotive applications. When compared to other nonvolatile memory solutions, such as parallel EEPROMs, SST's serial flash products use fewer wires to transfer data to and from a system CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. , thereby creating an overall savings in board space, power consumption and device cost. Because of the small die sizes of SST's serial flash products, the company is able to offer high-density products in smaller packages compared with some competing solutions. For example, SST offers a 2 Mbit serial flash product in a small 8-pin SOIC (Small Outline IC) A small-dimension, plastic, rectangular, surface mount chip package that uses gull-wing pins extending outward. See gull-wing lead, SOJ and chip package. (small outlined integrated circuit) package, whereas competing 2 Mbit serial flash products may require higher pin-count packages such as 28-pin SOIC or 32-pin PLCC (Plastic Leaded Chip Carrier) A plastic, square, surface mount chip package that contains leads on all four sides. The leads (pins) extend down and back under and into tiny indentations in the housing. See chip package. packages. SST's small 8-pin SOIC package requires minimal board space, thus resulting in an overall reduction in system cost and making miniature product designs possible. "Our entrance into the serial flash memory market is another example of SST's product diversification strategy," said Mike Briner, vice president, Application Specific Products Group at SST. "Customers requiring a serial flash memory solution will now be able to benefit from all the advantages our SuperFlash technology has to offer - low cost, smaller die size, small sector size, high reliability and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) Pronounced "c-moss." The most widely used integrated circuit design. It is found in almost every electronic product from handheld devices to mainframes. compatibility. SST is also capable of quickly ramping up to very high volumes of the serial flash products through our world-class manufacturing partners and technology licensees." SST's application-specific flash memory products are non-commodity flash memory solutions that provide customers with features and benefits targeted towards specific end-use products. Like all of SST's products based on SuperFlash technology, the new serial flash devices feature small sector erase capability. This allows designers to seamlessly partition code or data into 4 KByte sectors, resulting in faster erase times and an overall increase in system performance. SST's SuperFlash technology is a NOR type, split-gate cell architecture which uses a reliable thick-oxide process with fewer manufacturing steps resulting in a low-cost, nonvolatile memory solution with excellent data retention and higher reliability. The split-gate NOR SuperFlash architecture facilitates a simple and flexible design suitable for high performance, high reliability, small or medium sector size, in- or off-system programming and a variety of densities, all in a single CMOS-compatible technology.? |
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