Thanks Andy! I don't need to comply with the standard. In this
application, we're just looking for removable nonvolatile memory to hold
system configuration. The price and packaging of SmartMedia looks good,
thus my asking about interfacing. Are all these cameras, MP3 players,
etc. based on the processors you're suggesting?

In this application, there's a fair amount of user defined data that is
downloaded into the system from a PC. It seems that since the writing of
the media would only be when we're doing the download of data from the
PC, we could get around the big buffer requirement by passing it to the
card as it comes in from the PC. On the read side, we'll probably just
pull data from it during power up. Sequential access is probably fine.
We'd pull some data, send it to where it needs to go in the system, pull
some more data, etc.

I am using the 18f6620, so a fair amount of RAM is available, but I'd
like to avoid using it up on the Smart Media interface.

Right now we have the system designed using an I2C chip on a removable
circuit board. A little clunky and expensive, thus the look at Smart
Media.

THANKS for the info!

Harold


On Mon, 12 Aug 2002 16:48:16 -0700 Andrew Warren <aiw@CYPRESS.COM>
writes:
> Harold M Hallikainen <PICLIST@mitvma.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> > Anyone done any interface between a PIC and Smart Media?
>
> Harold:
>
> Do you need to be compatible with the SmartMedia Standard file
> format?  In other words, will your PIC write to SmarttMedia cards
> which will subsequently be read by other devices like cameras, PC
> SmartMedia readers, MP3 players, etc.?
>
> If so, I would STRONGLY recommend against attempting this with a
> PIC;
> the RAM requirements (16K for a logical-to-physical lookup table,
> plus another 2K or so for buffer/variable storage) will make it
> sorta
> difficult.
>
> If you have another processor (or a PC) doing all the thinking, or
> if
> you don't need to comply with the SmartMedia Standard, you COULD use
> the PIC as the electrical interface to the card.  You'd still need
> to
> buffer 512 bytes of data somewhere, though.
>
> If it were me, I'd use a different processor in any case.  If I had
> to comply with the SmartMedia Standard and I cared about throughput,
> I'd use either a VERY different processor (like a 100MHz+ ARM or
> equivalent) or dedicated hardware for certain functions (like ECC
> calculation and checking).
>
> -Andy
>
> === Andrew Warren -- aiw@cypress.com
> === Principal Design Engineer
> === Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
> ===
> === Opinions expressed above do not
> === necessarily represent those of
> === Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
>
> --
> http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
> ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>
>

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