BCM20732 EEPROM/SPI maximum supported size

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kich_2154156
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5 replies posted Welcome! First question asked

Hello,

Look at the following data sheet

EEPROM is 128K supported

Serial flash is 512K supported

What is  EEPROM or serial flash  maximum supported size?

thank you.

20732 data sheet

As follows:

EEPROM Interface

The BCM20732 provides a Broadcom Serial Control (BSC) master interface.
BSC is programmed by the CPU to generate four types of bus transfers: read-only, write-only, combined read/write, and combined write/read.
BSC supports both low-speed and fast mode devices. BSC is compatible with an NXP I2C slave device, except that master arbitration (multiple I2C masters contending for the bus) is not supported.
The EEPROM can contain customer application configuration information including application code, configuration data, patches, pairing information, BD_ADDR, baud rate, SDP service record, and file system information used for code.
Native support for the Microchip 24LC128, Microchip 24AA128, and the STMicroelectronics M24128-BR is included.

Serial Flash Interface

The BCM20732 includes an SPI master controller that can be used to access serial flash memory.
The SPI master contains an AHB slave interface, transmit and receive FIFOs, and the SPI core PHY logic.
Devices natively supported include the following:
• Atmel AT25BCM512B • MXIC MX25V512ZUI-20G

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MichaelF_56
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As a general rule of thumb, the nonvolatile (Serial Flash/EERPOM) size has to be slightly bigger than the application code size (also need some space for configuration and storing pairing/link keys). If Over the Air (OTA) upgrades are needed, you need 2x this size. There is no upper limit on the size of the nonvolatile, but it should be noted that EEPROMs are limited to 64KBytes because they use 16 bit addressing. At least this is my understanding.

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MichaelF_56
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As a general rule of thumb, the nonvolatile (Serial Flash/EERPOM) size has to be slightly bigger than the application code size (also need some space for configuration and storing pairing/link keys). If Over the Air (OTA) upgrades are needed, you need 2x this size. There is no upper limit on the size of the nonvolatile, but it should be noted that EEPROMs are limited to 64KBytes because they use 16 bit addressing. At least this is my understanding.

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Regarding EEPROM, I should also note that the team has used larger 128KByte EEPROMs as well.

These will work with fine with the the BCM2073x, but only the lower 64KBytes will be used/accessed by the firmware.

On the other hand, the EEPROM driver API provides low level access to write to any EEPROM location, so the application can still use the upper 64KBytes by specifying a different I2C slave address than the one used for the lower 64KBytes, which is usually 0xA0/0xA1 (some parts also use 0xA2/0xA3 while others use 0xA8/0xA9).

However, they cannot use this space to store app/patch code/configuration – only the apps own data using the raw EEPROM read/write API (note that none of the bleprofile_*NVRAM API will work with the upper 64K).

Note that the 16b/64k limitation is an EEPROM architecture issue more than a firmware related one. EEEPROMs always use 16 bit addresses, which limits their size to 64KBytes. The way EEPROM vendors work around this is to use a different slave address for the higher 64KBytes (so the same 16 bit address space is mapped to a physically different slave).

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