It seem that a Nucleo board - with an STM32 F4 series MCU, can be programmed in FLASH around 10,000 time and then something might begin to fail.

Has anyone here hit that limit? been developing on a board and then "wham" finally exceed the limit and have to dump the board?

When there is such a failure is it obvious or might someone end up debugging what they think is a code bug when in fact it is failed FLASH reads/writes?

 

It seem that a Nucleo board - with an STM32 F4 series MCU, can be programmed in FLASH around 10,000 time and then something might begin to fail.

Has anyone here hit that limit? been developing on a board and then "wham" finally exceed the limit and have to dump the board?

When there is such a failure is it obvious or might someone end up debugging what they think is a code bug when in fact it is failed FLASH reads/writes?

Never in development of software but when you do things like emulate high duration EEProm using flash or use it for a nvram file system data sectors or a file pointer index you must be careful with writing. There are plenty of wear algorithms that help.

For devices like at typical pic18, the actual flash duration is 10x the specification due to modern process improvements over the years. The cost to validate this is not good business when you also sell devices that have overlap.

 

As a matter of course, I always implement wear-leveling and error detection/correction/block-marking in my flash routines.

I've never had a product fail due to excessive wear.

 

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/appnotes/01095c.pdf
Emulating Data EEPROM for PIC18 and PIC24 Microcontrollers and dsPIC® Digital Signal Controllers

Total Effective Endurance = (Page Size – Page Status Size – Size of One Data EEPROM Bank) x Number of Pages x Endurance

Total Effective Endurance = (512 – 1 – 10) x 2 x 1000 = 1,002,000 Cycles

https://github.com/microchip-pic-av...uriosity-data-eeprom-emulation-demo/tree/main
dsPIC33A Curiosity Data EEPROM Emulation Demo
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers-and-microprocessors/dspic-dscs/dspic33a