Monday, November 21st 2011

Winbond Shrinks SPI Flash Chips

Winbond Electronics released a new line of serial peripheral interface flash (SPI Flash) memory chips designed to have tiny board footprints (sizes). 8-pin SPI Flash memory chips are in almost every part of today's computers, be it the chip that stores motherboard or VGA BIOS, the one that stores third-party controller firmware, or even boot ROM of network cards. Its applications get even broader with consumer electronics devices. Winbond launched new 8-pin SPI Flash chips in ultra-thin small-outline no-lead (USON) and wafer-level-ball-grid-array (WLBGA) form-factors, that have 20% smaller board footprints than common WSON and SOIC packages.

Winbond's new 6 mm² USON SPI Flash chips come in sizes of 512 Kb, 1 Mb, 2 Mb, 4 Mb, and 8 Mb, and with voltage options of common 2.5V and 3V. Low-power 1.8V options are available, too. The WLBGA SPIFlash chips will be available in 8 Mb and 16 Mb capacities, with package sizes of 3.4 mm² and 4.8 mm², respectively. Currently these chips are built on the more common 90 nm bulk manufacturing process, but Winbond expects to transition to 58 nm bulk process, driving down costs, in the future.
Source: DigiTimes
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5 Comments on Winbond Shrinks SPI Flash Chips

#1
Jstn7477
Always good to see some advancement in SPI chips. I remember when you needed a large (40 pin?) QFP EEPROMs a couple years ago, and back in the Pentium II days, a 40 pin DIP EEPROM for BIOS.
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#2
Breathless
Dang, my reply got pulled with the quickness
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#3
Sapientwolf
Hey, this is pretty cool. I'll have to keep this in mind, I'm currently working on some space contrained instrumentation. Thanks techPowerUp!
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#4
Ferrum Master
This is dumb... what the point of it? Cell phones for ages uses BGA flashes... and put a ball gird array item on PCB costs more in the final manufacturing cost.

Space? God there is plenty of it even on matx... we even don't have north bridges these days..

Damn, a broken Bios by some lammer user now should be repairable using such crap... hell I need a needle pin adapter for ūber tiny BGAs...

btw 40pin eeporms? Long ago those weren't serial flash, don't get carried away.
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#5
Steevo
Ferrum MasterThis is dumb... what the point of it? Cell phones for ages uses BGA flashes... and put a ball gird array item on PCB costs more in the final manufacturing cost.

Space? God there is plenty of it even on matx... we even don't have north bridges these days..

Damn, a broken Bios by some lammer user now should be repairable using such crap... hell I need a needle pin adapter for ūber tiny BGAs...

btw 40pin eeporms? Long ago those weren't serial flash, don't get carried away.
We only have space on bare basic boards. THose heatsinks for all the power consumption needed suck up space and with more RAM, more slots, more features......
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