According to a Lattice internal Atmel is the manufacturer of the overprized Altera EPCS devices.
At least it would make sense since Atmel is not responding to SPI flash memory requests...they just keep on forwarding emails.
From the technology point of view it should be either ST or Nexflash. OTOH they send samples almost right away... well...had to kick Nexflash several times until they do (o;
rick
"Jedi" skrev i meddelandet news:wPrKd.272$ snipped-for-privacy@read3.inet.fi...
Atmel has had problems in the sample department during 2004. Since december I have received everything I wanted in less than one week, so hopefully things have improved.
One of the problems was that if there were a problem with the sample order (like too many ordered), then nothing was even seen by the sample dept and thus not delivered. You may want to retry ordering the samples.
-- Best Regards, Ulf Samuelsson snipped-for-privacy@a-t-m-e-l.com This message is intended to be my own personal view and it may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
Actually this wasn't the original question (o;
I already have samples from SST, ST and Nexflash on the way (o;
rick
I'd be curious to know why you think ST/Nexflash serial flash are good?
Best Regards, Ulf Samuelsson snipped-for-privacy@a-t-m-e-l.com This message is intended to be my own personal view and it may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
Did I say that ST/Nexflash are better than others?
Don't care really much which is better...always comes down to:
- support - price - availability
If I would make a top list for SPI flash it would look like:
best regards rick
ps: And still no answer given regarding Atmel making EPCS chips for Altera (o;
From other posts to this newsgroup, EPCS devices are EPCS1- ST's M25P10 and EPCS4 - M25P40. I still haven't tried, but some others here have and said it worked without problems.
Ricardo
I know that..also tested it...see
Mostly every SPI serial flash using read byte command 0x02 can be used for Altera Cyclone chips...though not all are directly supported under Quartus programmer due to different device ID and different byte/page programming commands.
But still no one can confirm what Lattice is saying (o;
rick
I certainly have not heard anything about this. Checked out the different alternative.
Nexflash is nice due to uniform sector size. All parts seems to have 256 byte pages. It makes it easy to do a FAT file system w 512 B sectors. Fairly low current, both in read (4 mA) and in power down (1 uA)
64 kB Sector erase time sucks greatly - 2 seconds !!! Single RAM page in the device, so you have to wait until the device is ready until you shift in more. Max size 16 Mbit...SST is very quick to program/erase - 70 msa for chip erase. 18 ms for block erase. The 4 kB sectors makes the part harder to use, since it becomes hard to allocate a block for a single data entity. Single SRAM page, byte write is nice. 100 years data retention. Is this to be believed?
33 Mhz operation is also nice. Is only useable for 3.0V-3.6V - No mobiles phones ...(Run at 2.8 V) Anything larger than 8 Mbit? ....ST - 8 Mbit
64 kB Sector erase time is up to 5 seconds (he he he..) Say no MORE...Comparing them to the AT45DB642 (which is several years old)
1056 byte sectors, note: Not 1024: this measn that the extra bytes you need for handling the flash like CRC, erase count etc are inside the sector...Dual SRAM page, which means that you can load in a page, start programming the page and while the programming is in progress you can start loading the next page.
4 mA read current, and 2 uA power down current. 18 ms page programming, but the page size is 4 x Nexflash and they will need to shift in between every programming cycle, so in reality, they are quite close.18 ms block erase. This is 8 pages or8 kB, so multiply by 8 to get 144 ms per 64 kB block. Obviously it is faster, if you are happy with erasing a block.
Lacks byte programming unlike SST.
20 Mhz clock rate is a little low, but it will soon increase to 50 Mhz and the size will also increase to 128 Mbit.I leave it to the reader to draw conclusions.
-- Best Regards, Ulf Samuelsson snipped-for-privacy@a-t-m-e-l.com This message is intended to be my own personal view and it may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
Okay...finally received Atmel samples of AT25F1024A and AT25F4096. Both are not working as replacement for EPCS configuration for Cyclone FPGA.
rick
FPGA.
If you want o configure FPGAs, then you need to look at the AT17xxxA family.
-- Best Regards, Ulf Samuelsson snipped-for-privacy@a-t-m-e-l.com This message is intended to be my own personal view and it may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB
...and again Atmel is misunderstanding (o;
I was talking all the time about Cyclone FPGA...
rick
There are two conclusions: either Lattice is BS'ing (but I heard the same - and even more it is possible to use an Atmel SPI flash by overriding the reading of the vendor code), or worse Altera has played some dirty trick with their customers by selling the Atmel SPI flash for a silly high price.
To the reader to decide which is true - and draw their conclusions. I took mine and asked for samples of the ECP10 vs. S10 for a new application. The price I got is lower than the S10 and it is truly programmable with any SPI Flash.
Best regards,
Luc
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