Flash 8 Click Board™

How Does The Flash 8 Click Board™ Work?

The Flash 8 Click Board™ is based on the GD5F2GQ5UEYIGR, a highly reliable serial Flash memory solution offering flexibility designed for use in a wide variety of consumer applications from GigaDevice Semiconductor. It comes with a density of 2Gb based on an industry-standard NAND Flash memory core, representing an attractive alternative to SPI-NOR and standard parallel NAND Flash with advanced features. Organized as 256Mx8, the GD5F2GQ5UEYIGR has advanced security features (8K-Byte OTP region). It specifies a minimum of 100.000 endurance cycles with data retention of 10 years, allowing it to handle unlimited reads/writes to the memory.

The Flash 8 Click Board™ communicates with MCU through an industry-standard SPI interface (Dual and QSPI compatible) that enables high clock speed, supporting the two most common SPI modes, SPI Mode 0 and 3, with a maximum frequency of 104MHz. It is programmed/read in page-based operations and erased in block-based operations. Data is transferred to/from the NAND Flash memory array, page by page, to a data register and a cache register which is closest to I/O control circuits, acting as a data buffer for the I/O data (enable page and random data READ/WRITE and copy back operations). In addition to the SPI communication, this Click board™ also has two additional pins used for Write Protection and HOLD function routed to the RST and PWM pins of the mikroBUS™ socket.

The configurable Write Protection, marked as WP and routed on the RST pin of the mikroBUS™ socket, prevents the block lock bits from being overwritten and must be held low to inhibit all the write operations to registers. When this pin is low, also by setting the appropriate bits, all memory and register write are prohibited, and the address counter is not incremented. On the other hand, the HOLD pin labelled as HLD and routed to the PWM pin of the mikroBUS™ socket stops any serial communications with the device. Still, it doesn't stop the operation of reading programming or erasing in progress.

The Flash 8 Click Board™ can be operated only with a 3.3V logic voltage level. The board must perform appropriate logic voltage level conversion before using MCUs with different logic levels. What should be paid special attention to is the fact that if power shortage or power failure happens before Write/Erase operation is complete, it will cause loss or damage to data. However, the Click board™ comes equipped with a library containing functions and an example code that can be used, as a reference, for further development.

SPECIFICATIONS

PINOUT DIAGRAM

This table shows how the Flash 8 Click Board™ corresponds to the pinout on the mikroBUS™ socket (the latter shown in the two middle columns).

ONBOARD SETTINGS AND INDICATORS

FLASH 8 CLICK ELECTRICAL SPECIFICATIONS