PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Micro Digital Announces Whitepaper for Estimating Flash Performance

Costa Mesa, California, August 17, 2010 — Micro Digital is pleased to announce the posting of a new white paper on its website titled, “Estimating Flash Media Performance for Embedded Systems” by Yingbo Hu, R&D Embedded Software Engineer at Micro Digital. This whitepaper, and others, is freely available on Micro Digital’s website at www.smxrtos.com/articles/, as an embedded community service. The performance of flash media is generally not as good as people expect. An excerpt from the paper follows:

“Flash media are used by embedded systems to store program code, configuration information, tables, and various data. There are different kinds of flash media that can be used for this purpose. Besides cost and capacity of the flash media, performance is also an important factor – especially for applications, which require recording streaming audio or video or real time logging of high-speed data. This article provides ideas and examples of how to estimate read and write performance, and should be helpful for selecting hardware and software.

There are two types of flash media for embedded systems. One type is raw flash memory, which directly connects to a microprocessor via a processor bus. NOR and NAND flash chips belong to this category. Supporting raw flash memory requires a flash driver, which will handle the details of the flash media such as read/write, logical to physical address translation, bad block handling, wear leveling, and garbage collection (recycling of used blocks). The other type of flash media is called managed flash media. It connects to a microprocessor through a peripheral bus such as USB, MMC/SD, or CompactFlash. On the processor side, software, such as a USB host stack or a MMC/SD driver, is needed to interface to the flash media. Normally, one doesn’t need to know the details of flash memory.

To estimate the performance of flash media, it is first necessary to determine the physical limitations of the chip and then estimate the overhead introduced by the hardware and software…”

About Yingbo Hu

Yingbo Hu, R&D Embedded Software Engineer, graduated with a master’s degree in Automatic Control from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has over 12 years experience developing embedded real-time software, and specializes in writing device drivers for embedded peripherals, such as NAND flash and USB. He is the creator and lead developer of smxFFS, smxFS, smxFLog, smxWiFi, and smxUSB.

About Micro Digital

Micro Digital, Inc. has been in the embedded systems business for 35 years and has been producing and selling embedded software products for over 20 years. The company is dedicated to providing quality products and support for embedded systems at moderate prices. Micro Digital, Inc. may be contacted at (714) 437-7333, email: sales@smxrtos.com.