Qspi NAND Driver

[RonT]

I've read quite a few threads where people are asking for help getting NAND Flash to work with their devices, only to find out they are not supported. I see that only NOR Flash is supported and it seems like that's not changing anytime soon. 

I wanted to ask if anyone has written their own driver to accomplish this? I am in need of adding the Winbond 25N into our company's design that uses the nrf52840 and was looking for a good starting point, as I'm am new to doing embedded work through an SDK. 

Thanks for any advice.

[ovrebekk]

Hi Ron

This is essentially a hardware limitation in the QSPI peripheral, as it is only supports the NOR flash instruction set out of the box. Most NAND devices use a different instruction set, because of the architectural differences between NOR and NAND devices. 

There might be NAND devices that support the NOR instruction set, but we have yet to do the necessary research to verify this. 

Hopefully someone in the community can share some experiences. 

Best regards
Torbjørn

[RonT]

Thank you sir. I'm trying to look into writing my own driver for the Windbond parts. Not going to be able to use what is available in the NRF52840. 

[ovrebekk]

Hi Ron

Can you give me some details on what you are planning to use the flash device for? 

Do you have an estimate of how much and how often you have to write/read to the device?

The main limitation of NAND devices is that they don't support random data access. For general data storage this is usually not a problem, but if you want to run code directly from external flash it is not ideal. 

Best regards
Torbjørn