Winbond Electronics announced what is said to be the industry’s first Serial Flash memory with Quad-SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface). The W25Q16 16-megabit SpiFlash® Memory is the first in a family of high-performance memories ranging from 8 to 64 megabits, and features single, dual and quad I/Os in 8-pin packaging. According to the company, the W25Q16’s Quad-SPI architecture allows for greater than six times the performance of the current generation of Serial Flash memories and offers a true code-execution (XIP) alternative to Parallel-NOR Flash. With Quad-SPI performance, application-specific controllers can execute code directly from Serial Flash, minimizing pin-count and SDRAM usage. It can also improve boot time for traditional code-shadow applications. The W25Q16 SpiFlash memory builds on the success of Winbond’s popular W25X family of SpiFlash memories (one- through 64-megabit densities). The 25Q16 maintains function- and pin-out compatibility with the 25X, while adding Dual-I/O and Quad-I/O SPI capability. It supports clock rates up to 80 MHz, enabling an equivalent clock frequency of 320 MHz (40 MBps continuous transfer rate) when using Quad-SPI operation. Assuming a typical instruction fetch of 32 bytes, the W25Q16 is capable of random access rates of greater than 32 MBps. Other features include uniform 4K-byte erasable sectors for efficient memory allocation and storage of data; and erase-suspend/-resume capability, which is necessary for interrupt-driven systems that must temporally halt an erase operation to read from Flash memory.
Winbond Electronics Corp.
408-943-6666, www.winbond-usa.com