What affects programming speed?

Factors affecting programming speed

IC programming is an important step in electronics production. Some chips program slowly, which hurts production efficiency — a major concern for customers. Efficiency depends on programming speed, so what affects it? Here is our explanation.

1. The chip vendor. Different vendors use different manufacturing processes. The same class of chip from different vendors writes at different speeds, which directly affects programming time.

2. The size of the program, not the size of the chip. For the same product, does a larger chip capacity mean a clearly longer programming time? Not necessarily. In testing, an 8 MB chip and a 16 MB chip programmed with the same program file (smaller than 8 MB) take roughly the same time.

3. The programming interface. Different chips offer different programming methods. JTAG is noticeably faster than UART: some MCUs can be programmed over JTAG or over UART, and JTAG is clearly quicker. Some SPI Flash devices offer single-line and quad-line programming modes as well.

4. The programmer's own hardware. Hardware characteristics have a clear effect on programming speed. In our tests, different programmers programming the same chip differed by more than a factor of two in programming time.

5. The number of channels. More channels means more chips programmed at once and higher throughput. Programmers range from single-channel models to multi-site machines. For large volumes customers usually choose multi-channel programmers because the gain in efficiency is obvious: comparing a single-channel with an eight-channel programmer, the single-channel unit needs roughly eight times the time — switching to eight channels raises throughput eightfold.

In short, programming speed depends on the chip itself, the programmer and several other factors. Choose the equipment that matches your production volume.