Today's announcement by Macronix of a 256-Mbit serial NOR flash chip is interesting from a capabilities point of view, but leaves a number questions regarding market pull, interface standards and overall market size that makes me wonder who will follow Macronix to create a storm in this teacup?

Or, will the connectivity of every embedded device change the landscape completely and push the odds more in Macronix's favor?

From Macronix's point of view, the 256-Mbit introduction is an effort to secure the lion's share of what it expects will be a $2 billion market by 2014, up from $645 million today (figures from Web-Feet Research used by Macronix in its positioning presentation). That's a sizable chunk of change no matter where you sit. However, when put in perspective, it may be that Macronix's competitors have bigger opportunities to chase.

I spoke with Web-Feet's CEO and founder, Alan Niebel. He said serial NOR is $654 million out of a total $5 billion NOR flash market today, and by 2014 that total will reach $6 billion. So theoretically, serial NOR will take a larger share of the total and that may irritate Macronix's competitors, Numonyx, Winbond, Atmel and Spansion. In that order, with Macronix on top.

However, put against the back drop of a total NOR and NAND memory market of $20.4 billion, rising to $38.2 billion by 2013, and serial NOR becomes a small opportunity for the likes of Spansion, Samsung and Numonyx to worry too much about.

If they do worry about it, there's no real barrier to entry. Macronix itself admits that any of the top-tier companies could do a 256-Mbit flash next week, if they liked. All that's been lacking, according to Niebel is a standard interface they can all operate from. Will Macronix's new 32-bit scheme be that new interface? I don't know. Do you? What do you think of it?

Take a closer look at how the 32-bit addressing scheme works here and view the MX25L25635E's full datasheet here to get an idea of how Macronix has implemented it.

I can't myself recall the last time a field of highly competitive companies rallied around an interface standard introduced by one of their own without a lot of jostling and bloodshed first.

The third question is whether there's a market pull for a 256-Mbit serial NOR flash. Macronix is confident that set-top boxes, low-cost handsets, WiMAX, networking and servers will demand the extra capacity, along with the usual space savings and signal integrity a serial NOR provides over its parallel brethren. However, at a 1.8x cost increase, according to Macronix, for a same-size-package device over a 128-Mbit device, there isn't really much of a cost savings, though Niebel says this price will surely drop.

So, for double the price, you get double the memory in a market where cost is everything and any cost increase must be justified. If you can get your code into 128 Mbits, you're obliged to stick with it. That handicaps 256-Mbits from the start.

The question then becomes whether or not there'll be a burgeoning need to go beyond 128 Mbit for application code storage for typically low-end embedded systems. There may well be, and not only for the applications Macronix outlined.

As we imbue all embedded devices with some level of connectivity, the applications that have to run on these once-isolated systems may now gravitate beyond those required for single-purpose closed-loop systems. Instead, they may be weighed down with communications stacks, information gathering, collaborative system-type functions, and image and audio processing (yes, even big-brother-type features, if we let it happen).The silicon and sensors needed to add this functionality will amount to pennies in the near future, the application software on top is what will truly explode.

We'll be exploring the how-to and the implications of this ubiquitous embedded connectivity at the up-coming EETimes Virtual Conference: Connected Devices, where yours truly will be hosting a panel on processor choices and connectivity implementation.

In the meantime, I'm curious to know your thoughts on the implications, if any, of Macronix's 256-Mbit laucnh, the interface it's pushing and the potential for embedded connectivity to change the landscape completely.

At last week's tech fest at the IMEC research facility in Belgium, we were given an update on the technologies, processes and design techniques that will get us to 10-nm interconnects. But one slide hits hard and shows just what 10 nm really means.

The next time you have a great idea for an end product, you should look at bit more closely at your choice of IC: the vendor-as-partner model can do more to realize your idea than any venture capitalist or angel investor ever could--without eating into your long-term profits.

I went to see Buzz Aldrin at a book signing recently and during his discussion he waxed lyrical on the importance of going to Mars and how critical space travel is.

That struck me as odd: Why did he think it was necessary to convince people of the importance of space travel? His urging only underscored a heresy that I've been wrestling with internally for some time: Is space exploration still really worth it -- and does anyone even care anymore -- given the many other projects and challenges before us that clearly have more benefit?

I posed this in my DSPDesignLine blog. Join the discussion as right now it seems the passion for space is greatly diminished, though the 'curiousity' is still there. Fast-forward to the end portion of the blog, past my own gushing excitement over meeting Dr. Aldrin, and add your two cents to what is a crucial debate to be having at this juncture in history.

You're likely familiar with the concept of open-source software. But how about open-source hardware? I was introduced to that concept last week during a visit with Bug Labs, based in New York City. The goal of the Bug Labs approach is to reduce both cost and time to market. Peter Semmelhack, President/CEO of Bug Labs, claims that cost and time to market can both be reduced by 50%.

Bug Labs employs a "Lego approach" to hardware and embedded-system development. By this, I mean that they've developed a base computer, which is built with a Freescale i.MX processor (which uses an ARM core). And they've also built a series of I/O modules, things like GPS, WiFi, a camera, a motion detector, and so on. Those modules literally plug into the base computer (they're even hot-pluggable). When you plug them in, they auto-configure, and work almost immediately.

In all, Bug Labs plans to have about 50 modules available by the end of the year. They're also encouraging customers to design their own modules if they're application-specific.

While this concept is probably not the way to go for real high volumes, for low- and mid-volume applications, it makes sense.