ELECTRONICA, MUNICH, GERMANY – November 13, 2018 – Adesto Technologies (NASDAQ: IOTS), a leading provider of innovative application-specific semiconductors for the IoT era, announced it has shipped the first serial NOR flash devices supporting the new xSPI standard (JESD251 and JESD251-1), Serial Flash Reset Signaling Protocol (JESD252) and the latest version of the SFDP standard (JESD216C). Adesto’s EcoXiP™ eXecute-in-Place (XiP) non-volatile memory (NVM) fully supports these specifications, which were recently released by microelectronics standards body JEDEC. These standards make it easier for system designers to reap the benefits of EcoXiP in their designs and deliver smarter, more efficient and user-friendly devices.
Today, many emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and high-end microcontroller (MCU) designs need more program memory and data processing storage than can be implemented economically on-chip using embedded flash or SRAM. The new standards make it simpler for the industry to adopt NVM devices that use the Octal Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), such as Adesto’s EcoXiP, which delivers the higher performance and storage space needed. EcoXiP eliminates the need for expensive on-chip embedded flash, and it hits the sweet spot for power, system cost and performance, with significantly lower power consumption compared to other Octal devices and dramatically higher performance versus Quad SPI devices.
“NXP architected crossover processors with no on-board flash and provided an Octal interface to optimize off-chip NVM performance. This allows NXP to deliver a class of microcontrollers that boost processing performance and increase power efficiency at a very competitive price point,” said Joe Yu, GM of Low-Power MPUs at NXP Semiconductors. “Ultimately this helps designers add more features to their products and improve the consumer experience. A low-power external memory device, such as Adesto’s EcoXIP, is a complementary device for our i.MX RT series.”
The new xSPI (expanded SPI) standard establishes hardware guidelines to enable designers to easily add high-throughput Octal and Quad devices to their systems. The Serial Flash Reset Signaling Protocol defines a way to reset flash devices without a need for a dedicated reset pin. The SFDP (Serial Flash Discoverable Parameter) standard provides a consistent method of describing the functional and feature capabilities of serial flash devices in a common set of internal parameter tables. With it, OEMs can speed firmware development and time-to-market. The latest revision of the SFDP specification adds support for Octal SPI.
“Adesto delivers solutions that ignite innovation for next generation IoT devices. It was important that we help drive the development of these standards, and we are delighted to be the first company to ship serial flash devices with full support,” said Gideon Intrater, Adesto’s CTO. “This is the first time that there is a robust set of standards that defines ways for serial NOR flash to communicate, making it possible for companies to easily integrate the latest technology and increase the performance of their designs.”
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