Insights into Low-Power Serial Flash Memory

April 6, 2022

Macronix's Omar Mohammed talks about serial storage, eXecute-in-Place (XIP), and low-power applications.

This is part of the 2022 Electronic Design Forecast issue. You can also check out more TechXchange Talks videos.

Serial NOR flash memory provides a low-cost, low-power, small footprint storage solution for embedded applications. I spoke with Omar Mohammed, Technical Marketing Manager with Macronix, about serial storage, eXecute-in-Place (XIP), and low-power applications. You can also check out their whitepaper on low-power storage.

One of the key items that came up in our discussion was the migration to lower-voltage solutions. Turns out this can save significant amounts of power, which is very important in applications where power is provided by batteries or alternate sources like solar power or energy harvesting. While transistor sizes are shrinking for memory and processors, the code size of applications and operating systems continues to grow, increasing the demands on storage.

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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