Samsung's OneNAND Driver
Now Available as Open Source

Highly Popular Fusion Memory to Improve Performance in Mobile Devices

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced on February 22 that it is making the driver source code for its best-selling and highest performing memory publicly available, a move that will make it sought after by designers using the new Linux 2.6 operating system. Samsung is providing designers of mobile devices and other consumer electronics with the driver for its highly popular fusion memory technology ― OneNAND™ ― not only on its web site, but also through that of the Linux/Open Source community.
"Open source code has become one of the main forces driving the accelerated pace where consumers are embracing mobility, so our decision to make OneNAND available should be very well-received,"said Jon Kang, senior vice president of technical services at Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. "Open source is being rapidly adopted in Western Europe, Japan, Korea and China, for royalty-free standards-based software development,"he added.
Samsung's move will simplify Consumer Electronics designers'use of the first and most cost-efficient fusion memory, providing the code needed to quickly incorporate OneNAND's operational instructions.
OneNAND's fusion architecture features a single-level-cell NAND core with SRAM and logic elements to emulate a NOR Flash interface. OneNAND provides a sustained data 'read'speed of 108 MByte/s, which is four times faster than conventional NAND Flash memory, and a 'write'speed of 10 MByte/s, which is more than 60 times faster than multi-level-cell NOR Flash memory. It now is being designed into more than 100 CE products.
The driver for OneNAND will be available free of charge from the Open Source community at http://www.linuxhq.com /kernel/v2.6/15/ drivers/mtd/onenand/ and from Samsung at http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/FlashSW/lld_download.htm. Besides working easily with open-source code OS's, Samsung has OneNAND drivers also available for easy integration with the Symbian 9.1 operating systems, as well as Microsoft OS's. nw