In-system programming of non-volatile memories on microprocessor-centric boards

With the continuous growth of capacity of nonvolatile memories (NVM) in-system programming (ISP) has become the most time-consuming step in post-assembly phase of board manufacturing. This paper presents a method to assess ISP solutions for on-chip and on-board NVMs. The major contribution of the approach is the formal basis for evaluation of the state-of-the-art ISP solutions. The proposed comparison pin-points the time losses, that can be eliminated by the use of multiple page buffers. The technique has proven to achieve exceptionally short programming time, which is close to the operational speed limit of modern NVMs. The method is based on the ubiquitous JTAG access bus which makes it applicable for the most board manufacturing strategies despite a slow nature of JTAG bus.