Smart Tools for Smart Manufacturers - How to speed up production by choosing the right devices and the most efficient programming (manufacturing) strategy

When design engineers dream up that “next generation”, “newest”, “most
amazing” product, they are trying to do one thing above all else. They are trying to design that next great thing, the “break through product”, the most successful “widget” ever conceived, i.e. the “killer application.” By their nature, design engineers want to top what came before; to make whatever it is, improved, smaller, faster than before, in short, to make it better.

The ever increasing trend towards more complex, more feature rich mobile phones has placed significant pressure on the semiconductor manufacturers to produce denser, smaller and more capable Flash memory, all at competitive costs and with faster access and write times (including also, low voltage power consumption for longer battery life).

Many semiconductor vendors have tried to respond to the needs of the mobile communications market by increasing device density and decreasing device footprint size, so that next generation mobile phones can offer more features in space saving solutions. The constant demand for smaller silicon size with greater densities and capabilities challenges the design engineer to continue to realize competitive products, in spite of the difficulties linked to the production and the expected time to market.

The purpose of this white paper is to suggest to you some tools and strategies from ST and Data I/O to help your product be more successful by incorporating smart tools and the right devices into your next generation application, particularly in the manufacturing process based on the principles of “Lean Manufacturing.”

About ST’s Newest Breakthroughs in NOR Flash Memory Technology

The latest 512Mb and 256Mb NOR Flash memory developed in the new, state of the art 90nm process technology are the most advanced NOR Flash memories available today on the market. They are offered in subsystem solutions in combination with PSRAM or LPSDRAM devices in a single package, yielding faster code execution and more cost-effective pricing for 3G handheld applications.
Driving up performance, ST's new NOR Flash memories support read speeds of up to 133 MHz, 2x faster than currently available devices in the market.
Additionally, the program throughput of up to 0.5MBytes/s outperforms existing NOR Flash solutions by a factor of three.

FlashCORE Technology and “Lean Manufacturing”

Data I/O’s FlashCORE Technology represents the fastest programming
architecture for flash based silicon available today. The FlashCORE
architecture is at the heart of Data I/O’s “Connected Programming Solutions” that link design to manufacturing by standardizing algorithms, adapters and programming hardware so transfer of firmware is seamless from the design engineer to the production line. Data I/O incorporates FlashCORE in its FlashPAK desktop programmer and its family of automated handlers, the PS288FC, PS300FC, the new PS588FC and the “Just in Time” programming solution, “The ProLINE RoadRunner.

» Download the entire whitepaper in PDF format