I am a hardware engineer designing an embedded application. I want to add up to 1GByte of non-volatile memory. The first product offering will require 256MByte but I need room to expand. The whole assembly must be extremely small in size.
It appears my only option for a large non-volatile memory space in this embedded application is NAND flash. However, the micro I must use does not have an external memory interface. It has a SPI buss. It also has quite a few general purpose I/o ports.
I can't find SPI based serial memories above 32Mbyte. This will not suffice.
A friend recommended we BIT-BANG the memory interface between micro and NAND flash using general purpose I/O ports. This sounds complex. I haven't hired an embedded programmer yet so do not know what is possible. I DO NOT want to design a hardware platform this person will not be able to work with.
Can anyone lend me some insite about what is involved in creating such an interface? I know enough about embedded coding to get me in trouble. That is about it. Just want to start along the right path.
Gerb.