Micron Technology's recently launched Xccela Consortium is ostensibly aimed at promoting its high-speed, low signal count octal interface bus and ecosystem, but at least one early member of the group sees as also being necessary for unifying a fragmented market for NOR flash technology that supports the growing market for instant-on applications.

“Serial NOR flash has pretty much diversified over the past decade," said Mike Chen, GigaDevice Semiconductor's senior director of technical marketing, in an interview with EE Times. “Everyone has their ideas to and is designing their own product based on their customer needs. Everyone has their own ideas."

This has led to complicated product lines, Chen said. Based on customer feedback from the field, he said having a standard would make his life much easier. “We see a need in this product line to have some sort of unification," he said.

Chen is happy to see his previous employer, Winbond Electronics, on board as well. Winbond and AP Memory Technology are initial members of the consortium that aims to speed up industry efforts to bring a broad set of Xccela Bus compliant memories, controllers, ASICs, SoCs and other devices to the market. Emerging applications can be found in the industrial and automotive segments, where there's a demand for instant-on performance. “People cannot just wait for the system to boot up," said Chen.

Performance, Chen said, is the primary target for improvement, but availability, density, power consumption and security, are all areas that need to be addressed, as a well as a smaller overall package. “We can satisfy all six aspects with one product," he said. 

Micron, of course, is not the first company to address the instant-on segment. Cypress Semiconductor's HyperBus, HyperRAM and HyperFlash family of products has focused on the instant-on market, including the requirements advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). All vehicles under 10,000 lbs. will require backup cameras by 2018 and those have an instant-on expectation, as do other dashboard systems.

But as Chen observes, the Cypress technology is different from the standard SPI protocol deep inside, and it's not he approach he would take. “If I were going to design from the ground up I would stick with the Micron product. Hyperflash requires a brand new controller to use the product," he said. 

Chen added that existing customers want something that's easier to migrate to. “We're trying to stay as simple as before. We're not trying to kill Cypress in the process," Chen said. "We do see it as variation."

Chen said the overriding message that should be taken from the formation of the Xccela Consortium is the need for some unification around serial flash technology.

Richard De Caro, Micron's NOR Flash product line director, said the Cypress solution is essentially proprietary and competes with Xccela. “You may still have fragmentation in the marketplace, but a consortium will limit it," he said. Cypress is welcome to get involved, he added.

EE Times reached out to Cypress for its thoughts the consortium. In an email statement, the company said, “Cypress was the first to identify the need for a high-speed, 8-bit bus three years ago with the introduction of the HyperBus interface and products. The recent entry by other vendors reaffirms our view of the market's need for x8 high-performance products. Today, HyperBus has an established and growing ecosystem and Cypress has numerous design wins with HyperFlash, HyperRAM and HyperBus multi-chip package (MCP) products.

“Cypress has been working with other vendors to define an open high-speed 8-bit bus standard specification," it continued. “We believe working through JEDEC as a recognized standardization body is the best way to define an open industry standard and to create broad support to the benefit of customers."

Micron developed the consortium in part to support its Xccela products and create an ecosystem to meet the high performance requirements of customers, said De Caro. Serial flash, with its small pin count, reduces costs, but it has never hit the performance capabilities of parallel flash. “It's has been around forever because of that performance," he said. “That's what really drove octal NOR flash."

The need to get more performance has driven different companies in diverse directions, leading to industry fragmentation. De Caro said in the long term, different solutions that aren't compatible aren't going to benefit industry, and it's also important to think ahead to the next-generation of products. “It will hinder adoption and evolution of high performance ecosystems. It needs standardization."

By: DocMemory
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