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To: Road Walker who wrote (34891)	4/4/2001 5:54:36 PM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

John: I'm surprised AMD is still strictly NOR. Could be the reason they did not honor the AMD contract. Maybe a design win by a competitor with NAND? Another excuse for Alcatel, AMD just didn't keep up with the technology? You've gotta be kidding me. Do you even know the basics of flash technology? This post shows you clearly don't. -fyo

To: Road Walker who wrote (34891)	4/4/2001 6:27:00 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

John, My understanding of NOR vs. NAND flash is neither is superior to the other, they just have different applications. Actually, NOR type has been more of a high end, that is it goes to high end applications such as phones, cars, industrial machines, while NAND is more of a commodity, going to cameras, MP3 players and MP3 applications. I think Intel is mainly in NAND markets, while AMD is mainly in the NOR market. Joe

To: Road Walker who wrote (34891)	4/4/2001 7:46:57 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

"I'm not an expert on flash, but I believe that NOR or NAND can be designed into the same applications." There are certain cases where this can be done, but it isn't easy. From an application point of view, NOR flash looks like regular memory, except it is non-volatile. NAND flash is usually implemented more like a disk. For example, Samsung/Toshiba NAND flash has registers that you set up for a read or write and you write it in 512 byte sectors. So unless your microncontroller has on-chip flash or ROM, you are still going to need some NOR flash or maybe ROM to boot your system. And if you are trying to conserve RAM by doing execute in place, you are going to need NOR flash anyway... Note: this totally ignores the erase cycle problem. NAND flash often only has about 1k erase cycles. AMD NOR flash currently exceeds 1 million. Three orders of magnitude can be significant in certain applications. AMD has the best flash in the business. If you need the erase cycles (Intel can squeeze 100k out of you aren't as picky), very low power with good speed, very high speed or high operating temperature, then there is no choice but AMD. Exactly why Alcatel needed premium flash in a commodity like a cell phone, is a question with no real good answer.