Spansion redevelops mobile phone chip architecture
Published: 03 Apr 2007 12:25 BST
One of the largest providers of flash memory has announced a memory architecture that it says will improve mobile phone performance and reduce costs for manufacturers.
Spansion, a former collaborative venture between Fujitsu and AMD, told ZDNet UK that phones using the MirrorBit Eclipse architecture, which combines several existing types of flash memory onto one die, will appear in the first half of next year.
Describing MirrorBit Eclipse as "the beginning of a new family", Spansion's product and alliance head, Patrick Le Bihan, said the architecture would "integrate all the benefits of different flavours of flash that are available today" and substantially reduce the costs of putting memory into handheld devices.
The three types of flash memory — NOR, NAND and Quad — each bring specific benefits and drawbacks. NOR flash, for example, lets phones boot up quickly but has a relatively slow write time, making it best suited to low-end phones which do not run memory-intensive applications. Conversely, NAND flash can handle the storage requirements of a high-end smartphone, but the slow copying of data from NAND flash into a phone's RAM is also a reason why such smartphones take longer to boot up.
"[MirrorBit Eclipse flash will] reduce the boot time like NOR, but keeps the capacity of the NAND so you have a fast write time," Le Bihan said. "On top of that, it lowers memory costs. Some handsets were using a combination of NOR and NAND, and a single component that is going to execute and read the code and store the data costs less than two components combined."
Le Bihan also suggested that the new flash architecture would reduce the cost of putting RAM in a phone by up to 30 percent by reducing the RAM density — a development which could have a knock-on effect for improved battery life as RAM "consumes a lot of energy".
Spansion will be sampling the MirrorBit Eclipse architecture to its chipset clients in the third quarter of this year, and Le Bihan claimed that handsets using the architecture could be expected in the first or second quarter of 2008.
According to a recent report by market research firm iSuppli, Spansion overtook Intel as the leading supplier of NOR flash in 2006.
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