Can somebody tell me how often i can write to the internal flash of the xc167 controller? i'm doing a lot of tests and therefore i'm programming the flash very often and right now i am a little bit afraid that after too many write procedures the controller doesn't run properly. is there specified limit? Regards Chris
search on 'endurance' in the datsheet.
I didn't see a spec in the users' guide or the product brief. Infineon does refer to it as "Program Flash Memory", as opposed to a general-purpose memory, which sort of implies they don't expect you to erase it too often. Often, integrated flash memory intended for program store on microcontrollers has a lifetime of 10,000 erase cycles. More general purpose flash memories are usually rated for 100,000 or 1,000,000 cycles. It's hard to wear them out just with software upgrades. (Data logging is another matter, of course.)
The endurance is specified by Infineon with 100 times. However this is for the full temparture range and 10+ year lifetime. I guess your question is: how often can I reprogram the device for debugging proposes. We have several test boards that we have reprogrammed many 1000 times - NO PROBLEM SO FAR. Also non of our customers has ever reported that a Flash device went dead due to reprogramming. So practical you can reprogram the device many 1000 times (but I would not ship such a test board to end-users)