Winbond intros quad serial flash chips

MEMORY FIRM Winbond said it has started showing off serial flash memory with a quad interface.

The 16Mbit W25Q allows for single, dual and quad IO in an eight pin package and Winbond claimed that means six times the performance of current serial Flash and a code execution alternative to parallel NOR Flash.

The firm said the Flash will be used in a range of different ways including for PCs, wireless LANs, storage systems like DVD-HD and Blu-ray and the rest.

The 25Q16 unit clocks at 80MHz so will be able to be quadrupled to 320MHz. Each read instruction only needs 12 clocks rather than the current 40.

The chips will allow for random access rates of more than 32 megabytes per second. µ