Test solution meets ONFI flash memory standard

2nd November 2016

Tektronix

Mick Elliott

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What is claimed to be the industry’s first test solution for the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) standard is available for Tektronix high-performance oscilloscopes. The ONFI 4.0 test solution includes software for analysing DDR2/3 modes on the ONFI bus coupled with an effective probing solution based on interposers.

The ONFI standard is published by the ONFI Working Group to simplify the integration of NAND Flash memory into consumer electronics and computing platforms.

The ONFI 4.0 spec introduces the evolutionary NV-DDR3 interface with VccQ = 1.2V operation for increased performance and improved power consumption, scales NV-DDR2 and NV-DDR3 I/O speed to 667 MT/s and 800 MT/s, and adds ZQ calibration functionality.

As the speeds have increased and voltage levels have dropped, designers working with the ONFI bus face challenges to ensure compliance, debug timing problems and gain access to signals.

TEK-PGY-ONFI software enables design and test engineers to test the ONFI interface for compliance to ONFI bus timing parameters and provides automated measurements of Command, Address, Data in and Data out transactions.

A detail view feature in the TEK-PGY-ONFI software correlates each electrical measurement of an ONFI waveform by annotating it with the analog waveform to help debug timing problems.

Dense packaging and high data rates make gaining high-fidelity signal access to NAND flash devices challenging.

Tektronix offers support for a range of different mechanical form factors including socketed, direct attach and a patented edge probe design for extremely tight mechanical requirements. S-parameter models of interposers and probes are available for modelling or to generate de-embedding filters to be applied to the oscilloscope.

TEK-PGY-ONFI software runs on the Tektronix MSO/DPO70000 Series oscilloscopes with bandwidth of 4GHz -33GHz and recommends the P7500 or P7300 Series probes for testing. For some customers testing for ONFI, signal access may be poor or not available at all, therefore, Tektronix recommends ONFI 152 ball NAND Flash Edge high fidelity interposers from Nexus to achieve signal access while maintaining signal integrity.

The new TEK-PGY-ONFI software adds to the comprehensive set of solutions Tektronix offers for other memory technologies including eMMC, UFS and DDRA.