NOR Flash Driver

NOR flash is a low-capacity on-board storage solution. Traditional parallel NOR flash, located on the external bus of a CPU, offers extremely fast read performance, but comparatively slow writes (typically performed on a word-by-word basis). Often, these store application code in addition to providing a file system. The parallel architecture of traditional NOR flash restricts use to a narrow class of CPUs and may consume valuable PCB space. Increasingly, serial NOR flash are a valid alternative, with fast reads speeds and comparable capacities, but demanding less of the CPU and hardware, being accessed by SPI or SPI-like protocols. Table - NOR flash devices briefly compares these two technologies; specific listings of supported devices are located in Physical-Layer Drivers.