Freescale Semiconductor announced 90nm thin film storage flash memory technology for its next-generation microcontroller platforms. The flash technology includes FlexMemory, which provides a cost-effective, on-chip, enhanced EEPROM and can be user-configured as additional flash memory or as a combination of EEPROM and flash memory. The company claims that the technology offers an industry leading bit-level reliability through silicon nanocrystal technology. The use of fast, low-voltage transistors provides low-power read capability for power-sensitive applications with full flash operation specified down to 1.71V. Flash access times are less than 30ns. The technology is also claimed to deliver area efficiency, enabling a rich level of memory and peripheral integration across flash densities. The FlexMemory feature offers enhancements over traditional EEPROM, including customer-selected, application-optimised trade-off of quantity of available EEPROM (up to 16kbyte) and endurance (greater than one million cycles over full temperature and voltage range). It also requires only 1.5ms for erase + write, which is five times faster than traditional EEPROM solutions, claims the company. The memory can be used for additional application program code storage, storage for data tables or for byte write/erase system data. Samples of 90nm TFS technology and FlexMemory will be offered in Q3 2010.
