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Success Story: InHand Preserves Reputation of Reliability

Datalight FlashFX Pro Helps InHand Preserve a Reputation for Reliability While Improving Development Team Efficiency

The Challenge

As the leading provider of low-power embedded systems to medical, military, aerospace and industrial manufacturers, InHand’s customers rely on their reputation for highly reliable, robust and ruggedized embedded systems to produce battery-operated, hand-held wireless devices such as UMPCs, PDAs, wearable computers, industrial computers and smart sensors. Recently a key customer of InHand began experiencing data corruption related to the flash driver on their well-known Fingertip modules.  The unusual flash configuration required by the project was not compatible with the default flash driver. Despite several attempted work-arounds by InHand engineers, the customer’s data corruption issues persisted.

The Datalight Solution

After trying several different options to fix the problem, the InHand engineering team discovered Datalight FlashFX® Pro, an intelligent flash media manager designed to handle the complexities associated with NOR and especially NAND flash. FlashFX Pro solves many of the inherent issues common to flash with features like a sophisticated bad-block management process and advanced wear-leveling algorithms. It has also been shown to improve overall data throughput. Fast, efficient integration comes standard with drop-in support for over 300 well-known flash parts, allowing the InHand engineering team to integrate the FlashFX Pro solution quickly. In fact, they had the customer up and running within a matter of days.

The Customer Payoff

Immediately following implementation of FlashFX Pro on the customer’s project, the customer’s data corruption issues stopped.  Further analysis by InHand revealed that using the Datalight solution is more cost-effective than spending in-house development time whenever a new flash part is used and frees up resources for product improvement.  After careful consideration, InHand made the decision to include FlashFX Pro on their entire line of Fingertip4 and Fingertip5 products.

“Using Datalight’s drivers enabled our team to focus on optimizing other parts of the system while still providing our customer with highly reliable flash storage,” said Dr. Dave Stewart, a nationally recognized embedded systems expert and Director of Software Engineering for InHand. “The inclusion of Datalight’s FlashFX helps us continue our reputation for producing highly reliable, robust and ruggedized embedded systems. Our customers gain worry-free flash data storage on our Fingertip family of products due to the increased reliability of the FlashFX drivers over our previous solution.”