[sdiy] DSI,storage of sound programs, setups, etc, dsPIC?

[jays at aracnet.com]

Some thoughts.

One thing to keep in mind is a lot of these chips are used in consumer
devices. That means they'll get the cost down to as low as they can.
Saving a cent or two over a million units is making them money. With the
flash in the part you save the cost of another package, circuit board
space, solder. Yes they do get down to that level.

In a typical product you'll probably never run out of program cycles
for the flash. In an engineering/development environment you might.

Programming flash is usually done in large blocks. So to write a couple
of parameter changes out you usually have to read the block, modify it
and then write it out again. EEPROM areas are usually smaller and you
might be able to write individual address' in it.

Jay S.

On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:30:43 +0000, Gordon JC Pearce
<gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 22:12 +0000, Tom Wiltshire wrote:
>> The question was "Why store programs to internal flash?" and "Cos it
>> saves using an external EEPROM" is the only answer I can really see,
>> to be honest. Otherwise, you'd just store whatever settings in EEPROM,
>> wouldn't you? But if you have flash on-chip, you might think "Aha! I
>> don't need EEPROM! I can use the internal flash!". I can't see any
>> other motivation for doing it. EEPROM probably has better
>> characteristics (retention/write/erase cycles etc). If that's not
>> true, then maybe robustness is another reason, but it seems unlikely.
> 
> Why wouldn't you save in the internal flash?  "Wearing out the flash"
> isn't really an answer, since you're unlikely to save patches a hundred
> million times in the life of the instrument.
> 
> Gordon MM0YEQ
> 
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