ISSI Produces 2Mb to 32Mb Serial Flash Memories

Integrated Silicon Solution Inc. announced production-release of eight products to expand upon its line of 1.8V/3V IS25xD dual series of serial flash.

The IS25xQ family of flash, otherwise referred to as ISSIFlash, are Multi I/O Serial NOR flash devices designed with superset features to allow drop-in replacement reducing time to market and re-design efforts. Manufacturers of computers, networking, wireless, industrial, communications, and consumer segments can take advantage of volume availability of the 3.0V devices:

IS25CQ032 (32Mb),

IS25LQ016 (16Mb),

IS25LQ080 (8Mb),

IS25LQ040 (4Mb), and

IS25LQ020 (2Mb).

Low Voltage 1.8V options are available in densities:

IS25WQ080 (8Mb),

IS25WQ040 (4Mb), and

IS25WQ020 (2Mb).

These serial flash memories are all available in the space-saving 8-pin SOIC package for initial release. These devices will be available in additional packages such as WSON, USON, VVSOP, and KGD in 2014.

These devices are manufactured using 90nm nFlash technology and are positioned to build on the ISSI’s IS25xD family of dual serial flash memories available in 256Kb to 4Mb densities. This family of devices supports SPI, Dual-SPI, and Quad SPI operation to achieve high performance among serial flash memories. Uniform 4KB sectors and 64KB Blocks maintain backward compatibility to ISSI’s previous architecture as well as, drop-in replacements to other existing vendors. The finer 4KB sectors offer increased code density by allowing memory allocation and storage of data – features that are required in many Intel-based PC applications.

The packaging, performance, and flexibility makes it tailored for applications, such as tablets, desktops, notebooks, DVD players, recorders, WLAN, DSL, finger-print recognition, HDD, ODD, DECT, USB-Key, monitors, digital TVs, set-top-boxes, bluetooth, printers, wearable computing, industrial machine vision and robotics control, as well as driver’s diagnostic systems. The 25-series Quad SPI has become a choice amongst system designers for increasing SPI transfer rates when shadowing code to RAM and, in some cases, even for executing code directly (XIP).

“Serial flash offers considerable advantages in space, pin-count, and system cost as compared to parallel flash,” said Manjunatha Kashi, VP flash, business development, ISSI.

Automotive grade IS25xQ family of devices will be offered in 2014.

“Serial flash has the highest growth of any NOR flash type,” said Jim Handy, flash memory analyst, Objective Analysis. “It’s only natural that designers prefer serial products since they provide sufficient storage in a very small form factor at a lower cost.”

Serial flash market as applications continue migration from parallel to serial flash, more and more performance-enhancing interface features such as Dual-SPI, Dual I/O SPI, Quad SPI, and Quad I/O SPI, are available with speeds of 100Mhz and above. Combined with small foot-print, low-pin count devices, and high throughput, it’s one of the trends moving forward.

Most industry-analysts expect the market to grow with market projections exceeding 8 billion units by 2017.

Ordering Information and Specifications: