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Hey Guys, I am writing to my micro's flash one byte at a time using that APP note from NXP (AN10342_1), I saw that it is possible to write a page at a time. How do I go about writing a page at a time?
Thanx :)
Xarion
I agree. I have encountered several such cases. Very annoying indeed!
NXP tends to have quite good documentation.
But note that they often call their documentation of the functionality "User Manual". They contain information about how the different modules works, and bit descriptions for SFR.
Then they may have a datasheet that instead focuses more on power consumption, rise and fall times etc. I.e. a document intended more for a hw designer, while the user manual is mainly intended for the sw designer.
But whatever subdivision that has been made between different documents - without knowing the exact chip number, you can not know exactly which documents are applicable. And you can't know what errata that may be important. Many chips from the same family may seem almost identical, but be of different age, i.e. many of the errata from the earlier released siblings having been closed, but at the same time new errata may have cropped up.
Then they may have a datasheet that instead focuses more on power consumption, rise and fall times etc. I.e. a document intended more for a hw designer, while the user manual is mainly intended for the sw designer. the divison as I see it is that the UM is a family datasheet and the datasheet states what is unique to the family member.
Erik
At least for the ARM chips, the UM does contain a lot of "only for xx" information, including the pinouts, part id codes, ... Basically everything a sw developer needs, with the exception of the ARM documents about the core and instruction set.
It's just the ordering codes, electrical information (limits, static, dynamic, ADC precision...), temperature limits, mechanical tolerances, ... that are missing from the user manual.
And the datasheets can have download names such as datasheet/lpc2364.lpc2365.lpc2366.lpc2367.lpc2368.pdf which clearly indicates that they are just as family-wide as the user manuals.
The datasheets looks like "sell-in" documents, with a lot of bulleted lists with all features of the chips - something for an NXP application engineer to bring to a customer meeting to describe why the customer should select a specific chip or family.
So in the end, it can lead to quite interesting times if a developer only gets the datasheet or only the user manual. Best practices always requires that a developer scoups up all documents (and sample code) that are available on the producers web site and quickly scan through them to figure out which documents that are applicable.
In some situations, that isn't enough. The needed information may be missing but possible to deduce from the manuals from other processors (even from other families) from the same manufacturer.