Quickly Power Up and Program Your Dual SPI Flash Devices with the Promira Serial Platform and the Control Center Serial Software
2015-06-24
Rena
What to use:

The Promira  Serial Platform, together with the SPI Active Level 1 and SPI Active Level 2 Applications make an excellent tool for programming low voltage Dual SPI Flash devices. You can use the Promira platform with the Control Center Serial Software, and see how easy it is to provide up to 200 mA at the selected voltage level, and program and verify your target SPI device.

Promira Serial Platform and SPI Flash Demo Board for Fast Development and Pre-Test Figure 1: Promira Platform with SPI Flash Demo Board

Reap the benefits of  the Promira platform and the SPI Active - Level 2 Application:

  • Program EEPROM, Flash, or other SPI memory, in Single or Dual I/O mode

  • Up to 200 mA of power to embedded project, at voltage levels from 0.9 V - 3.45 V

  • SPI Master speed up to 40 MHz

  • SPI Slave speeds up to 20 MHz

  • 1 default response plus 8 unique slave responses of up to 256 bytes/response

  • Single slave response of up to 256 bytes

  • Use up to 12 GPIOs

  • Up to 3 Slave Selects (configurable, shared with GPIO)

  • Software configurable Slave Select (SS) polarity in master mode

Note: To use the SPI Active - Level 2 Application, the SPI Active - Level 1 Application must also be installed.

The Control Center Serial Software is an easy to use GUI that allows you to easily interface with your slave device, It includes the ability to program in batch mode, which makes running repetitive commands significantly easier.  The batch scripts can be saved as XML files that you can use as-is or modify as needed.

Following is a summary of how to set up and then program your SPI Dual Flash device:

Set up the tools:

  1. Connect the Promira platform to the Control Center Serial Software on your lab computer

  2. Connect the Promira platform to the target device

  3. Configure the Promira platform for Multi I/O SPI

  4. Configure the desired voltage level for powering the target device

  5. Configure the desired bitrate

  6. Configure the Promira platform for Dual SPI Mode

  7. Initialize the target device and read the device ID

Figure 3 below shows an example of this configuration in the Transaction Log:

Configure Promira Serial Platfrom for Dual SPI Mode in Control Center Software Figure 2: Configure Promira for Dual SPI Mode
Write, Read, and Verify

  1. Initialize the target device and erase the data sector

  2. Write data to the device

  3. Read and verify the data from the device

Figure 4 below shows the results in the Transaction Log:

Promira read write transaction in Control Center Software Figure 3: Transaction log from Reading and Writing  Dual SPI Flash Device

Want to learn more? For a complete set of instructions, refer to our knowledge base article Programming a Dual SPI Flash Using the Promira Serial Platform and the Control Center Serial Software. The example in the article uses the Flash SOIC-16 Socket Board - 10/34. Don’t worry if you don’t have the same board, you can easily modify the setup for your environment.

Additional resources that you may find helpful include the following:

If you have questions about our Promira Serial Platform or other Total Phase products, feel free to email us at sales@totalphase.com, or if you already own one of our devices and have a technical question, please submit a request for technical support.