Efficiently store gigabytes of data on MCU NAND flash

NAND flash is the fastest and most cost-efficient way to store large amounts of data, but when using external NAND memory with MCUs, RAM limitation is usually the bottleneck: for example, an 8GB NAND flash, divided into 4096 blocks, would normally require 8KB RAM.

Using block grouping, where the driver treats multiple blocks as a single block, considerably reduces the RAM used for administrating the NAND flash memory. Users can scale the size of a block group according to their requirements. With block grouping, the RAM for an 8GB NAND flash can be less than 1KB. Critically, block grouping does not affect processing speed.

This feature further improves the efficiency of emFile’s NAND driver. It has outstanding read and write performance: almost 6Mb/s for reading and 3.8MB/s for writing. Furthermore, it is fail-safe, which means the file system remains intact even in cases of unexpected resets. By adding the optional journaling feature, this safety can be extended to the data residing in the file system.