Date: 26/11/2006

Serial flash memory with 16M capacity and each sector of 4K bytes.

ST Microelctronics has introduced new serial flash memory M25PE16 to store 16 Mbits of data and has a sector size of 4 Kbytes. M25PE16 is suggested for storing source code and other such system data, where fast access and flexible erase is required but less board space is available. SPI compatible serial bus is used as serial interface which operates at 50MHz.
There are 32 sectors, each sector contains 256 pages of 256bytes wide each. Each sector is subdivided into 16 subsectors of 16 pages. At a time, a memory of 1-256 bytes can be written through page write or page program instructions. A page, sector, subsector and also complete chip can be erased all at once through different instructions.

There is a hardware/software write protection feature to protect the data from accidental programming or erasure.
The supply voltage range is 2.7V to 3.6V and works in the industrial temperature range of -40 to 85 Deg C. There is a sleep mode option otherwise called as deep power down mode to reduce system power consumption. Similar to other ST's serial flashes the data retention life is more than 20 years and more than 100,000 Erase/Program cycles per sector.

Availability: Now in samples and volumes in 1st Quarter of 2007.
Price: each $1.20 in 100k quantities