NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR IS EXPANDING FLASH OFFERING WITH NEW SERIAL FLASH

SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 14, 1995 -- National Semiconductor today announced it is expanding its family of Flash products with a 4Mbit Serial Flash device which combines NAND Flash technology with National's industry standard MICROWIRE interface. Together these features provide the first true cost-effective solution for low bandwidth file storage applications.

These applications can be split up into three storage categories: digital voice, digital image and data logging. Digital voice includes digital answering machines, personal digital recorders and voice pagers. Digital imaging includes desktop fax machines, laser printers and hand-held scanners. Data logging includes personal medical data loggers which sample human vital signs or in remote industrial control units which store a history of certain parameters.

"To create the most cost-effective solution, National studied the applications and discovered what tradeoffs could be made in hardware or silicon vs. firmware in the processor," said Rob Frizzell, Flash marketing manager at National Semiconductor. "The result is the smallest 4Mbit die for the technology."

File storage applications require that a system keep track of blocks off data through some form of directory. It is identical to the file management found on hard disk drives where names, dates, size of files must all be stored in a particular format.

"Now the system designer does not have to be concerned with the memory filing system. They can place more emphasis on the sequence of how data is captured or manipulated and not be concerned with how to store the data. In essence, we can make the memory disappear to the designer," commented Mr. Frizzell.

The first of these embedded systems that will be available is a digital voice recording solution using the CompactSPEECH(tm) family of processors. These have been tailored for digital answering machine applications, but find use in many other voice recording solutions. A single 4Mbit device will handle up to 15 minutes of record time. A maximum of four devices can be supported by one processor.

CompactSPEECH is a trademark of National Semiconductor Corporation.

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