Posted on May 17, 2011 at 13:24Although it could be a datasheet error, flash endurance is one of the many compromises that must be made when designing a microcontroller.
In order to improve endurance, one would probably need larger memory cells leading to bigger chips and higher prices.
I am pretty certain that some competitors improve the effective endurance of the memory by error-correction-coding, but that slows down memory access so it costs MHz!
And another competitor came out with devices where the specified endurance was only 1000 cycles!
But thinking about it, even with crash-and-burn software development, one is not likely to reach 1000 programming cycles.
It is only when one is using the Flash for data logging that one might feel constrained. But even here there are techniques which reduce the number of times a particular memory location needs to be written in exchange for vastly increasing the memory allocated to storing the information.
- Danish
