Freescale selects Spansion flash for Vybrid automotive chips

Freescale selects Spansion flash for Vybrid automotive chips

SAN ANTONIO—Flash memory vendor Spansion Inc. said Wednesday (June 20) that Freescale Semiconductor Inc. selected its serial peripheral interface (SPI) flash memory as the high-bandwidth memory subsystem for its new Vybrid automotive and industrial chips.

Spansion (Sunnyvale, Calif.) said the 80-mebabits per second double data rate (DDR) performance of its SPI flash memory offers more than 45 percent faster bandwidth than competing solutions, making it the ideal choice for high levels of interactivity.

Jeff Shiner, a chipset marketing business development executive at Spansion, said use of the company's NOR flash solutions for industrial and automotive applications requiring large, instant-on, relatively static graphics at the expense of DRAM. "There is [now] a completely different use case for NOR," Shiner said.

Spansion said automotive OEMs are requiring instant-on performance for instrument clusters to significantly improve safety and driving experiences. These new digital displays completely replace the main cluster panel with a display for conventional instrumentation, informatics and increased safety and hazard warning features, the company said. These displays provide drivers better visibility of their surroundings, such as the ability to display warnings of pedestrians in blind spots, assist with parking and provide safety information such as road hazard warnings, the company said.

Other upcoming safety features will include the potential to display in several modes, such as a night view option, where the cluster's infrared night vision system scans for pedestrian shapes and highlights them with yellow boxes, Spansion said.

Spansion FL Serial Flash memory is designed for automotive and industrial applications with a wide temperature range of -40°C to 105°C, high reliability, long-term product availability and support for the highest densities up to 1 Gb today, according to the company. The performance capabilities of the family deliver direct benefits to customers, including 3X faster programming performance to reduce manufacturing costs and 45 percent faster DDR read speeds for more responsive systems and a better user experience, according to the company.


TAG:Freescale Spansion NOR Flash