NAND flash being gaining widespread acceptance in the embedded domain, especially in the consumer electronics segment, e-con has developed a generic Flash Media Driver for common NAND flash memory chips with software ECC.
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This FMD software is a customizable component that can support any standard NAND flash chips and is designed to be interface-agnostic. The FMD layer is designed such a way that it can easily adapt the hardware interface layer. This FMD can be linked against the FAL layer of the Windows CE. The block diagram shown below describes the usage of the generic FMD in a typical Windows CE system. The FMD and the FAL combined together provides the Block Driver interface and any standard Windows CE file system such as FATFS or TSFAT can be integrated on top of this FMD. The FMD is designed to be interface-agnostic and supports NAND flash connected to the Processor bus (like in Sirius, where the 16-bit NAND flash is interfaced directly to the Processor bus) or through PCMCIA (as given in Intel Application note) and this customization can be done instantly.
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The FMD supports software ECC and has been tested on e-con's PXA270 based Sirius Reference Platform. If the hardware can provide ECC support, then ECC calculation module done in software can be customized to make use of the ECC hardware. The e-con's FMD has been tested with the standard Partition utility for formatting and partitioning the NAND flash memory.
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Most of the FMD functions are reusable at the boot level, so that boot loader even store the Windows CE image inside the NAND flash. The OS image can be kept inside a special segment (say OS partition) inside the NAND flash and this will not be exposed to the users. This can effectively hide the OS partition from the user and remaining Flash memory partition can be read/written by user. This flash partitioning has been tested with Sirius platform, where Windows CE image is kept at separate 32MB partition that is invisible to the user.
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This customizable NAND flash FMD can be used by its customers who are using the NAND flash
in their designs. As the NAND flash chips are gaining broader acceptance in embedded domain,
the availability of such NAND flash FMD drivers will help OEMs to speed up the time-to-market of
its products. The NAND FMD driver is available as one-time license model with source code. The FMD
driver can also customized for the customer platforms separately. For additional information,
please write to  .
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