Differences in SPI Flash ICs

[ataradov]

I'm comparing the price between 3 SPI Flash manufacturers and wondering why there is such a difference?

1. Adesto AT45DB641E - $4.08 - http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/AT45DB641E-SHN-B/1265-1185-5-ND/4901482
2. Spansion S25FL164K0XMFI011 - $0.86 - http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/S25FL164K0XMFI011/1274-1097-ND/4457674
3. Winbond W25Q64FVSSIG - $0.96 - http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/W25Q64FVSSIG/W25Q64FVSSIG-ND/2815931

There are a number of others, but the price is closer to Adesto one. The prices are for a single IC, but they scale pretty much proportionally with quantity.

So what's the catch? Is is just the brand name reputation? Or there is something else behind this.

Assuming that I only need basic data flash, that will be interfaced with a slow MCU, so 100+ MHz SPI frequency will never be achieved.

[AndyC_772]

Spansion is one of the biggest memory manufacturers in the world, so you won't go wrong with one of their devices - assuming it's technically compatible with the rest of your design, of course.

Winbond have also been around a while; from what I recall they seem more focused on high volume, low cost consumer products than on the industrial market.

I've never heard of Adesto until now. Their web site says "In September 2012, Adesto expanded ... by acquiring Atmel’s DataFlash and Serial Flash product lines."

[ataradov]

I've never heard of Adesto until now. Their web site says "In September 2012, Adesto expanded ... by acquiring Atmel’s DataFlash and Serial Flash product lines."

I do trust Adesto, since I worked with them since they were Atmel and they kept the product well and made good improvements.

But surely that is not enough to justify 4x price difference. It is possible that actual price difference in high volume is significantly lower, of course.

I'm not doing anything critical, so literally any SPI flash memory will do. I was about to add Adesto one to the order (just a reflex), but then decided to check what is out there, not expecting a huge price difference, so I got surprised.

[amyk]

One obvious difference is the Adesto part is 1.7~3.6V whereas the other two are 2.7~3.6V.

The rest of the price difference could be due to quantity alone - Spansion and Winbond are much bigger in volume than Atmel/Adesto.

[tszaboo]

One obvious difference is the Adesto part is 1.7~3.6V whereas the other two are 2.7~3.6V.

The rest of the price difference could be due to quantity alone - Spansion and Winbond are much bigger in volume than Atmel/Adesto.

And the Adesto has about 10 times less power dissipation in deep power down mode. So I guess much better suited for battery operated low power stuff.

[senso]

Spansion and Winbond have SPI Flashs in every laptop, desktop motherboard, graphics card and almost every Android Tablet ever made in the world, huge huge volume production allows them to offer those low prices, the other difference is the power consumption as already noted.
For a battery powered gadget I opted for a (much) smaller EEPROM, lower power consumption in sleep, read and erases, but I traded 64Mb of memory to 512Kb, so theres that..

[Marzogh]

From what I can see from playing with flash ICs from these three suppliers for the last year or so (I have been working on a library to get flash chips from all these companies working with the Arduino. You can find v 2.2.0 in the library manager in the Arduino IDE - look for SPIFlash.) Spansion seems to make SPI flash chips that have greater functionality than their Winbond counterparts, but I can get the Winbond ones to work better in conditions that require battery sipping - Spansion has gone as far as getting rid of the 'Power Down' opcode on their newer/larger flash memories forcing me to design boards around a MOSFET to cut power to the chip when its not being used.

The Adesto ones perform better over a larger voltage range (even when I push them below spec) and as amyk said, they are the best at power-sipping.

However, I'd like to think the future belongs to FRAM. I've been replacing SPI flash on my board designs wherever I can, with SPI FRAM, as it is much better for power management and I can stop worrying about writing entire pages at once or erasing 4KB blocks at a time - FRAM's the best of the flash/EEPROM worlds - it just needs to get cheaper!