What kind of performance and integrity do the 5000 Series chips provide for external non-volatile memory?
Concern for external memory performance is generally restricted to two areas: device reset (or start-up) and memory accesses (reads or writes) during application processing. Because 5000 Series chips copy the contents of the external non-volatile memory to on-chip RAM during device reset, you can expect approximately an extra 50 ms to be added to device reset for this process. However, device reset should be a relatively exceptional event for devices in the field. Also, because all application access to memory is to the on-chip RAM, external memory performance does not affect application processing. Writes to the external memory (for non-volatile application data) are managed by the system firmware.
