
But it is slow by nature and this will create a bottleneck and impact the performance of embedded applications. What is the problem with flash memory, that makes it need a special interface? Flash memory is cheap and durable which makes it an attractive option for embedded applications. But engineers struggled with one important problem, which is adding more memory to their embedded devices. SPI was enough for most of the use cases like reading data from sensors and sending data to actuators or output devices and is still one of the most preferred protocols for on-chip serial communication. Why did the damn engineers come up with yet another protocol? Wasn’t SPI with speed up to 16Mbps enough for all applications?

advantages of Quad-SPI over SPI and parallel memory.

Let’s see further in detail about the following in this article. It is faster than traditional SPI as quad-SPI uses 4 data lines (I0, I1, I2, and I3) as opposed to just 2 data lines (MOSI and MISO) on the traditional SPI. It can be also used to store code externally and it has the ability to make the external memory behave as fast as the internal memory through some special mechanisms. It is especially useful in applications that involve a lot of memory-intensive data like multimedia and on-chip memory is not enough. It has been specifically designed for talking to flash chips that support this interface. Quad-SPI, also known as QSPI, is a peripheral that can be found in most modern microcontrollers. What is Quad-SPI? It is a serial interface, where 4 data lines are used to read, write and erase flash chips. In this article, I am presenting all the useful and interesting facts on Quad-SPI that I have learned through my research. I had to read several pdfs to wrap my mind around this concept.

If you have just mastered this SPI interface, then looking at Dual and Quad SPI can be overwhelming.
