IMX8 Mini Flash corruption on power supply removal

Technical Support
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#1

Hello,

I am working on our custom carrier board design for the IMX8 mini SoM and would like to check the following with one of your hardware engineers.

Our system provides 5V to the IMX8 Mini SoM module. In our product, the customer can unplug the 5V power sometimes. When this happens, I am not sure how long the rail capacitance will hold the 5V power for but it will not be for more than a few tens of milliseconds at most.

I saw the a note about removing 5V VCC and the possibility of getting the flash corrupted, which made me worried.

I realise that the SoM has a power off input (CTRL_PWR_BTN_MICO#) to gracefully turn off the SoM before removing power, but it says in the Toradex spec sheet that this may take several seconds to shut down before the 5V power can be safely removed.

The problem is that when the user unplugs the 5V, I will not have this much time to gracefully shut things down.

Is there a solution for preventing flash corruption if the main 5V power input is removed by the user?

Thanks in advance for you help!

Lakshman

#2

Toradex provided images uses EXT4 journaling file system. So even if flash corruption happened in most cases file system will be successfully recovered though you can lost uncommitted changes. Please check this documents for details .

1 Like
#3

Hello w1002644,

If you want to store user data before the power down you could also think about using some supercaps and monitor the input voltage.

Best Regards,

Matthias Gohlke