The Rise to Dominance of NAND Flash

By Bill Graham

Flash memory is the dominant form of non-volatile memory for embedded systems and has been since the EEPROM days. I remember using an ultraviolet lamp to erase the old EPROMs, those were the days. You could erase your EPROM and permanently damage your eyesight at the same time!

NOR flash, traditionally dominant in embedded systems, has provided as a relatively small amount of non-volatile memory for booting the device and retaining critical parameters during power-off. NOR flash was a good choice because it supports execute-in-place which removes the need to copy the entire image from flash to RAM to execute.

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