Taiwan tips memory card format

Taipei - A technology consortium in Taiwan is putting the finishing touches on a memory card format that it says is twice as speedy as, yet cheaper than, USB 2.0. The Mmicro-Card is compatible with the popular Secure Digital and MultiMediaCard formats already in the market, the group said.

In a related development, a member of the consortium will take the wraps off a flash memory architecture in March at the high-profile IT industry gathering known as CeBit, in Hannover, Germany. Although few details are available, backers claim the memory architecture will enable cards that are 66 percent smaller than the reduced-size MMC or miniSD cards now coming into the market (see story, below).

As engineers rushed to finish up the spec's documentation last week, the alliance met with representatives from the Multi-MediaCard Association, which oversees the open-standard MMC format and is interested in combining the two specs and talking about promotional cooperation. An MMC spokesman declined to comment on the new format. The alliance has not engaged with the SD Card Association, of which all but one Mmicro-Card company-Richip Inc.-are members (Power Digital Card Co. Ltd. and ITRI sit on the association's board of directors).

The Mmicro-Card Alliance has been working on the spec since May. Part of the motivation is to get out from underneath royalty payments of 6 percent for SD cards, of which Taiwan is the No. 2 assembler, said Liu Chih-yuan, who directed the project at ITRI and is chairman of the Mmicro-Card Alliance. "We are No. 2, but we cannot define our own spec, so we must pay a lot of royalties to the foreign companies," he said. "So these card vendors have come together and asked for ITRI's help to define a new spec and issue new patents in order to have our own spec that can become popular in the market."

Aside from the 16-bit bus' higher data rate, backers also point to the Mmicro-Card I/O as a major benefit, claiming that it's simpler to design with than that for SD cards.

"The SD I/O is not so easily used. It requires a lot of effort to develop, especially in terms of software," said Gordon Yu, president of C-One Technology, which sells flash-based cards under the brand name Pretec.

The simplicity derives from the use of USB protocols for the digital portion, he said. But the speed is twice that of USB 2.0, and the power consumption only one-third or one-fourth that of USB 2.0, Liu said. "That's our strength. It's a very low-power, high-speed USB-compatible interface. So we are complementary to the MMC."

Yu also said it could be difficult to market the spec, mostly because of the confusing plethora of standards already in the market. "People are fed up because there are so many standards," he said, "and every few years there is a new one."

"The major consideration is the need for high performance, the need for an infrastructure for the future and the need for simplifying the I/O card architecture," Yu said. "That's our strategy. We don't expect the Mmicro-Card will be popular in one or two years, but we are laying a foundation to say if you are looking for a change, then make the change for the next two years, but also think of changes for three to five years [down the line]."

The alliance plans on introducing the card in various stages this year, with demos early on and full-fledged functionality by year's end. Cards based on the format would be competitively priced with MMC-based cards, according to the alliance.