How to enable qSPI flash for _much_ higher flash throughput (up to 8x!)

The UPduino flash is a qSPI/DTR capable device. ie. it is capable of operating with four IO’s instead of a single IO and also using both edges of the clock, effectively giving 8x the bandwidth on the SPI bus. In an actual use case, this bandwidth increase will only happen for burst read/writes.

Note that this is not the default as the primary requirement was for the UPDuino to be 100% backward compatible. If qSPI mode were made the default, some of the designs that used the two extra pins required for qSPI would not work.

The layout makes special arrangements to allow for this mode of operation of the flash by shorting R24/R25 in the schematic below:

UPduino qSPI connection schematic

The corresponding portion of the layout is labelled qSPI for clarity and should be shorted as shown.

UPduino qSPI connection layout