Analog Devices recently issued a PCN stating that the vendor for the internal SPI flash memory in the ADSP-BF51xF devices has discontinued the 4Mbit flash memory used in these products. Unfortunately, a replacement could not be identified in the 1.8V domain that had the same feature set and timing specifications. Given that changing the power rail for the VDDFLASH supply was going to be hardship enough for existing designs, every effort was made to select a replacement that would not require hardware retest and would have a minimal impact to any already developed software drivers.
Going forward, the memory included in the new ADSP-BF51x-F16 devices is Spansion's S25FL116K SPI Flash Memory. All of the commands and timing that are present on the existing ADSP-BF51xF-F4 products are met by this die, so hardware retest is minimized (apart from changing the VDDFLASH power supply to the 3.3V domain, no other hardware modifications are necessary). While there are more hardware features available in this device, keep in mind that the SPI design in the ADSP-BF51x Blackfin product itself is unchanged, so there are many features that are NOT supported (multi-IO read, fast read at 108MHz, XIP, etc.) and must be disregarded when looking at the datasheet. The important thing is that the commands and the timing requirements related to the supported commands in the previous memory are at least met by this new device, so existing drivers should work with minor tweaks.
For example, the ADI processor applications team successfully modified the SPI flash programmer that is featured with VisualDSP++ supporting the existing processors to work with the new model, and the required changes were minimal - the sector map and number of sectors had to be updated to cover the much more available memory, and the manufacturer and device codes had to be added at the initialization phase as acceptable responses from the memory. With these minor adjustments, all supported commands that worked previously continued to work with the new memory.
Update: Attached are the SPI flash programmer drivers written for CCES and VDSP++ by the ADI processor applications team. The driver written for CCES will only work with the new Spansion S25FL116K, while the driver for VDSP++ will work with both the existing SPI flash and the new Spansion SPI flash.
EE-367 covers these driver changes for the BF51xF16 devices.
This FAQ was generated from the following discussion: BF516F gone obsolete!!!
