[sdiy] Serial Flash memory programmer

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

Richie,

Do you need to program Flash for mass production, for small scale manufacturing, for prototyping, or just for piece-work? Do you plan on programming the Flash chips as loose parts before surface-mounting them? Have you considered simply ordering the parts from Micron, Atmel, Microchip, or Spansion with pre-programmed contents? If you want to program the Flash in-circuit, after they're mounted, then usually the best way to do it is with the microprocessor that's already on the board.

There are a lot of variables, including the fact that many Flash manufacturers add custom commands to their chips that may not be supported by a generic programmer. Another issue is that the chip must be powered to be programmed, and if it's already soldered to the board then powering the Flash will power everything else and presumably start reading from the Flash (which interferes with any attempt to write to it).

Brian


On Feb 5, 2017, at 3:46 PM, "Richie Burnett" <rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk> wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a decent unit for erasing/programming/reading serial (SPI) Flash memory chips using a Windows PC over USB?  I'm only wanting to program or read the odd chip here and there, so only very low volumes.  I'm happy to use an exposed board "dev kit" type of thing, or a more expensive finished product, but ideally under GBP 200 ($250).  Mostly wanting to program 8-pin and 16-pin surface mount NOR Flash chips from the likes of Micron, Atmel, Microchip, Spansion, etc, from Intel HEX record files.
> 
> I know it's relatively easy to make my own programmer using a microcontroller, but at this time I am really busy and don't want to get bogged down in all the different page size, sector size, erase block size, programming configuration settings for each device that I might need to program.  I've spent many hours writing SPI Flash driver code on micros in the past, but just want to buy a tool I can rely on to do a job now.
> 
> Many thanks for any suggestions.
>