Spansion has announced what it claims is the industry's fastest serial flash memory, the Spansion FL-S family at 65nm. The series has over 20% faster DDR read speeds and three times the programming speed over competing serial flash solutions, the vendor said. The Spansion FL-S delivers automotive grade temperature ranges and in some applications, eliminates the need for DRAM, the vendor said. It is available from 128Mb to 1Gb. Serial flash memory (SPI) transmits and receives data in one, two, four or eight bits per clock cycle from the same device, enabling backwards compatibility and faster speeds. Most solutions today use one, two or four bits, whereas Spansion's FL-S products expand the bits per clock cycle to eight. The 128Mb and 256Mb Spansion FL-S products are sampling now and will start production in October. The 512Mb density will be in production in the fourth quarter followed by launch of the 1Gb density in the second quarter of 2012.