High-performance NOR flash for mission-critical applications

RS Components now offers Cypress Semiconductor’s award-winning Semper NOR flash memory products. Semper NOR flash memory is now in production and is intended to support automotive, communication, and industrial applications. Semper achieves the ISO 26262 automotive functional safety standard for electronics in vehicles and is compliant with IEC 61508 for industrial applications. Semper is the industry's first NOR flash memory to be Automotive Safety Integrity Level ASIL-B compliant and ASIL-D ready.

Next-generation 5G wireless communications, providing more than 20 times the bandwidth of current networks, will enable new 'always connected' applications in industrial IoT, connected and autonomous vehicles, and portable medical devices. To achieve high reliability, bandwidth and functionality, the SoCs and FPGAs powering 5G radios and base stations will need increasingly large amounts of configuration and boot code data to be stored and accessed quickly. Semper NOR flash meets these demands by providing densities up to 4Gbit and JEDEC xSPI compatible interfaces, extending the bandwidth up to 400MBps.

Semper NOR flash offers densities from 256Mbit up to 4Gbit, with reliability, performance and 10-year longevity required for mission-critical applications. Semper NOR devices are compatible with multiple SoCs and FPGAs.

Semper devices offer a range of low-pin-count serial interface options, comprising legacy SPI, DDR Quad SPI with data rates up to 102MBps, and JEDEC xSPI compatible HyperBus and Octal interfaces with up to 400MBps data rates. Using XIP (eXecute In Place), programs can execute directly from flash memory, providing high-data-rate Quad SPI transactions to better the performance of parallel or asynchronous NOR devices.

The company's EnduraFlex architecture enables system designers to customise Semper devices to suit particular applications, defining partitions to offer high memory endurance of up to 2.5 million cycles or long data retention of up to 25 years.

These flash memories are AEC-Q100 qualified, and proven at extreme temperatures from –40C to +125C. Operating voltage is 3V or 1.8V. Packaging options include 24-contact BGA, eight-contact WSON and 16-pin SOIC.