The era of NAND has fully arrived for embedded systems! Octal NAND flash that breaks the scaling limits of NOR (2)

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Introduction

This page is titled "The era of NAND has fully arrived for embedded systems!" Octal NAND Flash Breaks NOR 's Scaling Limits (1)”, I will explain the NOR type that is reaching the limit and the NAND type that is still evolving.

See our previous article here.

The era of NAND has arrived in full swing for embedded systems! Octal NAND Flash Breaks NOR's Scaling Limits(1)

Flash memory: NOR type reaching its limit and NAND type still evolving

"NOR Flash", which is currently used in many systems, is reaching the limit of cost efficiency in some applications such as automotive and industrial. Applications such as automotive graphics displays and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) often have code sizes larger than 512Mbits. However, beyond 512Mbits, NOR flash becomes difficult to scale, resulting in excessive die size and cost.

On the other hand, "NAND flash" has high scalability in the capacity range of 1 Gbit or more, and is attractive in terms of cost. However, conventional NAND flash does not have sufficient read speed for operations such as shadowing code into RAM.
Some vendors are trying to solve this problem by introducing octal interfaces with 8 I/Os in "NOR Flash". However, the cost of NOR flash is very high, so the cost of this solution is also high. On the other hand, by making the interface of "NAND flash" octal, it will be possible to improve both the cost structure and the throughput.

Winbond “OctalNAND” has much higher throughput than common QspiNAND and much higher program/erase speed than NOR (see Figure 1). Also, since the die size of NAND is much smaller than that of NOR, the cost is also greatly reduced.

For example, a 1 Gbit octal interface NOR flash costs twice as much as a 1 Gbit octal interface NAND flash.
Another advantage of NAND over NOR is programming speed. NAND has a faster program time than NOR, which is very important for applications such as automotive OTA where the code and firmware in the system need to be programmed quickly.

Figure 1: Flash memory capacity and maximum read speed (Image credit: Winbond)

Octal NAND Flash Market Opportunity

Clearly, there is a large market for solutions that eliminate trade-offs between capacity, performance, and cost.

According to IDC, by 2024, it is expected that there will be 50 million autonomous driving Level 1/Level 2 vehicles.

EVs will have a CAGR of around 18%, all of which will require a boot-up sequence to enable the system, creating a huge demand for flash memory. Of course, besides booting, we also need to load other functions for each system.

The gaming market is also a huge opportunity. The total number of game consoles shipped in 2020 is about 47.8 million units.

Firmware update speed is critical for a better gaming experience, which requires memory subsystem performance and throughput.

Automotive, AI, consumer electronics, and industrial equipment manufacturers can utilize NAND flash memory with an octal interface without spending a lot of money on NOR flash, which is difficult to scale with a capacity of 512 Mbits or more, to provide high-capacity code storage. and capitalize on market growth opportunities.