The continuous demand to create smaller, longer-lasting, battery-powered devices challenges circuit designers to achieve more energy efficiency without sacrificing performance.
When designing a battery powered system, the typical path is to focus on low-power components. Often when flash devices are operated in low power mode, this comes at the expense of longer erase and program times as well as slower read speeds.
Energy, of course, is calculated by multiplying power and time.
Energy = power x time = current x voltage x time
Ultimately, when operations take longer to complete, more energy is used to perform a specific task.
The AT25EU SPI NOR Flash family offers designers a radically more energy-efficient solution for code storage, event logging, and data logging applications.
The AT25EU achieves its ultra-low energy objective with the following important characteristics.
Very low power consumption for all operations
The AT25EU consumes much less current than standard flash products during read, erase and program operations. Comparison to similar competitive products show read power is up to 70% less and program power up to 75% less. Comparison of Full Chip Erase demonstrated even more dramatic results at 90% less current consumed.
Unrivaled erase time
In the same comparison, erase time, which is fixed and unaffected by the erased block size, often resulted in order-of-magnitude lower energy during flash write operations compared to standard flash devices.
For complete details, please read the application note.
Unique page erase operation
The page erase feature of the AT25EU family is exceptional. In standard flash products every write operation, even as small as writing a few bytes, requires erasing a 4K byte block as a minimum. The AT25EU only requires erasing one page or 256 bytes. For applications that make small random write operations, this is ideal.
Ultra-low energy consumption
Because energy is calculated by multiplying power and time, the combination of lower current consumption and much shorter erase times makes the AT25EU consume significantly less energy.
For complete details, please read the application note.
