Lpc2000

--- In lpc2000@yahoogroups.com, Jayasooriah <jayasooriah@...> wrote:
>
> Tom, what you say does not appear to add up:
> 
> As I explained, my findings during in FTL testing are that IAP calls
failed 
> and did not return.  Anyone who knows about FTL would immediately
recognise 
> how good FTL is in flushing out flash memory reliability problems.
> 
> I was also reminded that Philips took set an entire section to explain 
> ECC  alludes one to problems with flash reliability.
> 
> While the ECC section appears to be a spin doctoring (reporting a
bug as a 
> feature) of defects in the ECC implementation, the fact that ECC is 
> required IMO is there are flash reliability problems.
> 
> I have never previously worked with flash memories for which I could
not 
> take advantage of their NOR or NAND properties.
> 

Flash ECC requirement varies from technology, process, type. Nand
flash  memories have 16 bytes allocated per 512 bytes for ECC data.
Presence of ECC does not indicate a problem as long as data is intact.
AFAIK only Philips has cmos 18 embedded flash technology. ECC might be
a requirement at this process geometry.

> Philips most recently has given a further indication of this by stating 
> "the bootloader is unlikely to get erased or corrupted during IAP
call even 
> if wrong frequency is used."
> 
> This begs the question: what does happen then?

Again this type of language is used by companies to avoid making
absolute claims. Does not bother me at all. I don't expect programming
/erase to succeed with wrong frequency.

> >What if you
> >erased the philips bootloader while developing your own.
> 
> My boot loader (in the context of the FTL problem I reported) is no
more 
> than an application run by the Philips boot loader and which sits in
sector 
> 0.  It does not have any flashing capability whatsoever.
> 
> It does not speak well of the LPC if the boot sector can be
destroyed in 
> the process of developing an "application", albeit this application
serves 
> to load Intel-Hex formatted files into RAM, not flash.
> 

Didn't you say (in some other post) that you have a better flash
programming algorithm than Philips? While developing that algorithm it
is possible to erase the boot sector. My apologies if you did not make
that claim.

> 
> I have no objections to you resting easy, but advising other uses
IMO does 
> not make sense.  What is your justification for refuting my evidence?

Lack of concrete evidence (code example/conditions demonstrating the
problem). Thousands of lpc users around the world are
using IAP/ISP without any failure. BTW ISP also uses IAP to program
the flash. I expect to see a lot more users reporting erased boot
sector. So far there are only two. One of them turned out to be a
false alarm.

Tom