Hi everyone,
A few months ago I ordered a batch of SPI flash chips from AliExpress for my
own projects. After all, one does not simply order one flash chip.
The seller accepts custom orders for parts that are not listed. He asked me
which chips I wanted.
My answer was simply:
Everything. I want 3-10 samples of everything.
Apparently everything in China is… a lot of chips.
One thing I did appreciate at the time is that the seller is a trader, not a
manufacturer. He spent several months sourcing the requested parts before
shipping them. Since I had bought from him before, he simply assumed this was
another one of my 'buy samples of everything' requests. By the time everything
had been collected, there was no way I was going to leave him holding the bag.
Fast forward a few months, and I now have roughly $3k worth of SPI flash
devices. Thanks to the recent flash memory price increase, they are probably
worth more today (around 10K in Mouser). Still a more honest ROI than NFTs.
Nobody got rug-pulled.
The practical consequence is that, over the coming months, I expect to submit a
steady stream of verified chips to flashrom.
For each device I will collect the datasheet, verify the identification, and
group variants by JEDEC ID, voltage variants, etc.
The main thing I need to watch out for is avoiding duplicate testing, because
many of the same SKUs arrived in four or five different packages (DIP, SOIC,
TSOP …).
Some of these parts are already EOL or out of stock worldwide. That does not
make them useless, though. Someone repairing or recovering an older device may
still run into them.
I also do not regret paying for the lot. The cost of the chips is small
compared to the amount of human time it should save. Instead of multiple people
wondering whether flashrom really supports a device, reviewers rechecking the
same datasheets, or users waiting several release cycles for someone to
eventually verify a chip, that work can simply be done once and upstreamed.
This email is mostly a heads-up. If you start seeing chip verification patches
arriving like a broken cron job, nothing unusual is happening. I am simply
working through a very large pile of flash chips.
Some people buy 48 GB of VRAM. I bought 48 GB of SPI flash.
Veni, Vidi, Verified.
(Repeated 1000 times.)
Abdelkader Boudih
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