A serial interface flash memory device designed for a wide variety of high-volume consumer based applications in which program code is shadowed from flash memory into embedded or external RAM for execution. The flexible erase architecture, with its erase granularity as small as 4-Kbytes, makes the device ideal for data storage and eliminates the need for additional data storage EEPROM devices. Physical sectoring and erase block sizes have been optimized to meet the needs of today's code and data storage applications so that memory space is used much more efficiently.