Flash For Smartcards
A smartcard technology demonstrator combines a 32-bit secure microcontroller with 1MByte of Flash memory. This demonstrator was developed within the European Union MEDEA+ [email protected] project. The chip is codenamed ST22FJ1M.
EEPROM offers program/erase speeds of a few milliseconds but requires a relatively high voltage (18V) to be applied during the write process. New smaller process generations make it increasingly difficult to design devices that can withstand 18V, limiting EEPROM scalability.
Page Flash is a derivative of standard Flash technology. Standard Flash offers large sector erasure in around 1s and fast programming of about 10microsecs. Page Flash offers the same fast programming time as Standard Flash but also allows individual data words (32-bits) to be erased in a few milliseconds and to rewritten more than 100,000 times.
The two types of Flash can be mixed on the same chip at no additional cost and without any modification to the standard Flash manufacturing process.
At the beginning of 2003, the concepts developed and validated on the ST22FJ1M demonstrator will be used to create a range of products based upon the ST22 core with Flash/Page Flash.
