RE: QSPI Difficulty with Zephyr and Nordic IC

ovrebekk — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 11:24:09 GMT

Hi Eric

As mentioned by Anthony the QSPI flash driver supports NOR devices only, not NAND devices.

NAND devices normally use a different instruction set to that of NOR devices, and are also more complex to use. With a NOR device you don't have to worry about bit errors in the data you read or write (unless you are pushing the number of erase cycles of your device). NAND devices are cheaper, true, but one drawback of this is that they are less reliable as well and you might need to run error correction algorithms in your driver in order to ensure that your data is correct.

Is it possible to connect to your device using SPI rather than QSPI?

Best regards
Torbjørn

RE: QSPI Difficulty with Zephyr and Nordic IC

Anthony W — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 20:56:18 GMT

Although the Windbond chip documentation sounds a bit similar between the two, there are components of the NAND interface that don't exist in the NOR interface (and perhaps vice versa), so I think there's no guarantee the NOR drivers will work with NAND chips (and probably plenty of reason to believe they wont). I would be very interested if you find a solution, NAND offers a lot of benefits over NOR for low-power, high-capacity, small-footprint operation. It would be nice if there were some solid support for those chips.