Design and Implementation of a Fine-Grained NAND Flash Programmer

Existing NAND Flash programmers usually read/write the entire contents of a flash chip, even if there is only partial data to be reprogrammed, for example, when the firmware in an embedded system is updated. In this paper, we describe a fine-grained NAND Flash programmer that can program a NAND Flash memory chip in small increments, such as a sector, a page and a block. The design of a fine-grained communication protocol is the key problem to the programmer software, wherein a sector serves as the smallest unit of data transmission. Experiments show that such a programmer can drastically reduce the time it takes to update firmware when the firmware can be modified in small data units.