NAND flash

Larry Doolittle
2001-10-16T15:25:17Z

Steven J. Hill wrote:
> First of all, the NAND FLASH driver was written for raw NAND flash
> chips that were IO mapped into the address space.
> ...
> SmartMedia is an entirely different beast in that has a some hardware
> between the CPU and the NAND flash chips inside. It is similar to
> Disk-On-Chip devices which use NAND/NOR flash with wear-leveling,
> error correcting and other things done transparently in the hardware.

I think you should double check that assertion. My understanding is
that the "Smart" in the name is a bug. These are actually NAND chips,
consumer-grade packaged, standardized, and marketed, with no smarts at
all. So you _could_ use the nand.c driver, with the right interface-
specific wrapper layer to get at the device.

Unfortunately, the result would not be content-compatible with other
SmartMedia users, because SmartMedia also has a standard for encoding
blocks on the nand chips. I tried to read that standard, but the PDF
file is encrypted in a way that is incompatible with xpdf-0.92. The
URL for that reference material has been posted here before, it's
http://www.ssfdc.or.jp/spec/english/

- Larry