Some thoughts: "1GB flash hack possible? Or why not shipping 1GB directly?"

[Harald Welte]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 09:10:11AM +0100, Pierre Hébert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wednesday 24 January 2007 01:47, Justyn Butler wrote:
> > So my answer to your question is: perhaps not from your USB memory
> > stick, but you will be able to upgrade the flash chip if you've a
> > little experience with surface mount hacking.
> 
> You cannot simply replace chips like that. The S3C2410 used in the neo, 
> and other devices, is accessing RAM, internal flash and devices through 
> memory mapping, with a 32 bits address. 

No, I'm sorry, it isn't ;)

Only NOR flash is addressed like ROM/RAM/EPROM

The Neo1973 is accessing NAND flash directly via a industry-standard NAND flash
interface, which is a special-purpose interface where you serially shift
in the address and parallel read back of the data.

This has about nothign in common with USB Flash drives, which have a
dedicated microprocessor with firmware to make a NAND flash module
appear as a storage device.

If there was a technical way how we could have put larger NAND flash in
the device, we would have done it.  Unfortunately the S3C2410 controller
only supports 512byte page sized NAND, and all the large NAND chips have
larger page size.
-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
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