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CompactFlash Competitor Compact flash memory card By Yoshiko Hara, EE Times Tokyo -- A compact flash memory card that uses a file format with larger sectors has been proposed by Sony Corp. and five other Japanese companies. They say the format is better suited to audio/video and digital still cameras. Tentatively called MemoryStick, the card, will compete with the CompactFlash format supported by SanDisk Corp. and its backers, as well as Toshiba Corp.'s SmartMedia card and the Miniature Card format supported by Intel, Sharp, Fujitsu and Advanced Micro Devices. The card also has the backing of Casio Computer Co., the largest player in the digital still-camera market, Fujitsu Ltd., Olympus Optical Co., Sanyo Electric Co. and Sharp Corp. An industry analyst called MemoryStick "a sign of probable reorganization" of the compact-flash-card market. "The group members in a body will form a rivaling power to CompactFlash in the market," said the analyst, Masahiro Suzuki of Dataquest. The card is shaped like a stick of chewing gum--21 x 50 x 2.8 mm--in which four flash-memory chips can be mounted. A logic ASIC developed by Fujitsu is also implemented for memory control. For use in consumer products, the card has only 10 pins to increase reliability and durability. The capacity is 2 Mbytes to 32 Mbytes using currently available flash chips, but it is scalable as denser chips become available. A Sony spokesman said that the MemoryStick has a simplified file management, using 8 kbytes as the minimum recording size. Audio and video data are generally copious and were not handled efficiently on card formats with 512-byte segments optimized for computer-based data processing. The file format is compatible with an image-data format proposed for the IrDA standard to transmit digital still-camera data by infrared ports. That format is being proposed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), Sony, Sharp, Casio and Okaya System Software. When the proposed IrDA image format is adopted as an IrDA standard, data exchange with computers will also be easy, the Sony spokesman said. (Next article.)
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