Boot from NAND flash ???

[Charles Manning]

On Sun, 16 Jun 2002 17:58, Der Herr Hofrat wrote:
> > > There's another important limitation. Who guarantees you, that your
> > > "boot-page" does not get bad or is a bad block already. That's the
> > > reason, why DOC has 4 blocks with the same code.
> >
> > The first page of NAND is guaranteed to be good.
>
> do you have a pointer to docs that explains this ?
> is it common to all NAND devices that they replicated the first block in
> hardware or did I missunderstand your statement.
>

They do not replicate the first block.

What happens is this:
* At manufacturing test time, bad blocks are identified and are marked.
* If more than n blocks are found to be defective, the part is discarded.
* If the first block is found to be defective, the part is discarded. 
ie. when it ships, block zero is guaranteed good.

Of course, block 0 might fail with time....

At least one doc on the Samsung www explains this.

-- Charles