[coreboot] Yet another idea of an SPI flash chip programmer

[Tom Sylla]

This will definitely work, a couple of years ago, we researched this
exact setup. Our plan was to put headers on the motherboards were we
deisnging, to have an easy de-bricking mechanism. A co-worker wrote a
windows SPI flasher in a day or so. I have seen that exact device used
to program SPI ROMs, as well as master JTAG, and program Altera FPGAs
(they have a generic bit-bang mode too). It works quite well.

I think I have sent these to the list before, but DLP Design makes
pretty cheap little adapter boards ($20-40), including one for the
2232 series:

http://www.dlpdesign.com/usb/2232m.shtml

That with a protoboard and an appropriate socket is all you need for a
SPI programmer. If you have a SPI programming socket on your
motherboard, it is even easier. It should be pretty fast too.

I am actually making an LPC ROM reader/writer from a FT245 (similar to
paraflasher, but using USB instead of parallel) Both windows and linux
support for the devices is very good.

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 6:45 AM, FENG Yu Ning <fengyuning1984 at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are lots of flash programmer out there, but none of them (those
> I know about) fits my requirement well.
>
> I would like a programmer to be:
>
>  * able to program SPI flash chips,
>  * not slow (program 512k bytes in 3 mins),
>  * with a driver whose source code is available (or not difficult to write one),
>  * simple, and
>  * cheap.
>
> There is one that almost does the job,
>
>  http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/spi-flash-programmer
>
> but
> [0] would it be very slow?
>
>
> Recently I find a chip FT2232x
>
>  http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/FT2232C.htm
>
> It seems that the chip's IO could be configured to work in bit-bang
> mode and thus able to implement as an SPI I/F.
>
>
> [1] I think it is easy to build a prototype programmer using this chip. Is it?
> [2] Is the programmer going to meet my requirement?
>
> yu ning
>
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