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Tuesday, March 02, 2010

"CHIPS: Freescale Thin-film flash mimics EEPROM"

Freescale unveiled its 90-nanometer thin-film flash memory technology for next-generation microcontrollers at Embedded World tradeshow in Nuremburg, Germany today. The thin-film flash memory technology is set to be delivered on microcontrollers in the second half of the year, according to Freescale. Look for thin-film flash to supplant polysilicon gates over the next few years. R.C.J.


Freescale unveiled its FlexMemory scheme for microcontrollers, said to make life easier for applications programmers. The FlexMemory approach surrounds flash memory with a hardware architecture that simplifies tasks for programmers by emulating ordinary electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM), according to Freescale. Freescale described how it was moving from polysilicon floating gates for its embedded flash to nanocrystalline thin-film floating gates last year. The advantage of Freescale's thin-film storage material is that it is relatively immune to leakage, since charge is isolated on nanocrystals thereby preventing any single defect from draining charge off the whole floating gate.
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