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SMART Modular Technologies is offering a family of high-speed synchronous Flash SIMMs organized as 2M, 4M, 6M and 8M x 32, with a slightly modified JEDEC standard 80-pin pinout. Synchronous Flash SIMMs enable the user to derive the highest possible speed from a system, by permitting operation with zero wait states in the read mode at speeds up to 33 MHz.
Since there is no official JEDEC standard pinout for synchronous Flash SIMMs, SMART decided to make the synchronous flash pinout as close as possible to the JEDEC standard pinout for asynchronous devices. SMART's slightly modified pinout won't affect most flash users. Only two pin connections differ from the JEDEC standard for flash - pins that affect read only. Pin seven is normally a no-connect pin, so SMART used it for the clock signal. Pin thirty, which is normally the highest address pin, is used as a second control pin needed by Intel's synchronous flash.
Since the balance of the pinout is the same as a JEDEC pinout for Flash SIMMs, users can utilize either synchronous or asynchronous Flash SIMMs in a system without requiring hardware modifications.
When used with a microprocessor on a burst or pipelined bus, these synchronous Flash SIMMs deliver read performance at least as good as DRAM SIMMs and possibly better. They can also eliminate the need for code shadowing from nonvolatile memory - such as ROMs, EPROMs and others - to DRAM.
Read performance is at least three times higher than the performance of asynchronous Flash SIMMs. The synchronous pipeline read interface of synchronous Flash SIMMs is capable of executing multiple read accesses in parallel. Systems can be implemented with either burst or pipelined busses.
Synchronous Flash SIMMs are available with optional on-board active RESET control. See SMART's Standard 80-Pin Flash SIMM listing for more details on this option!
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