Felix Held

When developing or testing firmware on a hardware platform, the developers have to either move flash chips between the target and a programmer, use a target board that is prepared to be used with a flash programmer connected or use an expensive SPI flash emulator instead of the flash chip. For bigger companies and few devices, the latter is quite affordable, but for the other cases, the cost can become a limiting factor. In this lightning talk, I'll give a short presentation on the qspimux2, which is a small board that sits between the mainboard and the SPI flash, connects to a programmer and makes sure that board and programmer won't interfere when accessing the flash.

Back at the beginning of home computers, volatile memory was a rather easy problem to solve in the computer architecture, but with the computers getting faster and multiple cores, it has become a surprisingly tricky problem for processor and chipset designers to solve. This talk tries to shed some light on the difficulties of implementing high-performance memory subsystems and how solutions to those difficulties affect the design of RAM, memory controllers, cache subsystems and even the microarchitecture of the processor cores.