Freescale unveiled its 90-nanometer thin-film flash memory technology for next-generation microcontrollers at Embedded World tradeshow in Nuremburg, Germany.

Freescale unveiled its FlexMemory scheme for microcontrollers, said to make life easier for applications programmers. The FlexMemory approach surrounds flash memory with a hardware architecture that simplifies tasks for programmers by emulating ordinary electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM), according to Freescale.

Freescale described how it was moving from polysilicon floating gates for its embedded flash to nanocrystalline thin-film floating gates last year. The advantage of Freescale's thin-film storage material is that it is relatively immune to leakage, since charge is isolated on nanocrystals thereby preventing any single defect from draining charge off the whole floating gate.

Today, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) must roll-their-own software to make flash memory—which can only be written and erased in large blocks—appear to be capable of ordinary byte-level writes and erase like a traditional EEPROM. By mapping virtual EEPROM onto flash memory blocks, an algorithm can emulate byte-level writes by re-writing the whole block into a new location along with the single changed byte. To speed up that lengthy process, OEMs must add SRAM buffers plus the memory management software with which application must interface.

 The thin-film flash memory technology is set to be delivered on microcontrollers in the second half of the year, according to Freescale.