Flash behaviour after exceeding endurance limit

[Sebastian Bøe]

Hi,

I have an nRF52 chip that has likely exceeded the flash endurance limit.

I am observing that after an ERASEALL, not all bits are erased, but after retrying ERASEALL multiple times eventually all bits become 1.

I have 2 questions.

Are these symptoms consistent with exceeding the flash endurance limit?

Can the flash's effective maximum lifetime be extended by repeating ERASEALL until all bits are erased?

[Roger Clark]

I presume you are using the flash for data storage rather than reprogramming the device thousands of times.

In which case, as you seem to have exceeded the life of the flash, you should probably consider a different storage strategy or using external storage of some form that does not have the limitation of flash memory. e.g MRAM