The Nakhimovsky article seems more pro-SNDK than pro-SSTI.
commvergemag.com
_____________________________________________________________________________________
The Post-PC Era
The hit products of yesteryear—Walkmans, VCRs, tape decks, television sets, film cameras, and many more—are rapidly being replaced by MP3 players, DVD players, CD-ROMs, HDTVs and digital cameras. And all these new devices belong to the digital domain. As Bill Gates profoundly announced in his keynote speech at the 2000 Consumer Electronics Show, "The new consumer era will no longer be PC centric, but digital content-centric."
Consumer Quirks
"All the way back to LP records, consumers have always looked for ways to duplicate and customize their content to meet their own unique tastes....the large physical dimensions of conventional storage media, such as hard disk drives, floppy drives, and magnetic tapes, prohibited the usage of such bulky devices in smaller, portable applications. So system designers had to think of other solutions for rewritable, low-power, compact media for mass data storage and retrieval."
Sensitivity to Cost
"Flash can't claim to be the cheapest storage solution in terms of cost per megabyte, but it has secured a permanent position in applications that need more storage than a conventional floppy disk but less storage than the smallest hard disk drive. As a solid-state technology, flash also boasts ruggedness, which has become increasingly important with the rise of portable 'digital content centric' consumer products."
_____________________________________________________________________________________
OEM and Consumer Benefits Defined
"While embedded flash made the camera design cheaper (you didn't need to include expensive flash-card interface sockets and connectors), it didn't allow for future upgrades. Consumers, however, quickly showed their preference for removable flash cards, which make data exchange easy. In addition, flash cards provide simple operation and the ability to upgrade to higher capacities. So flash cards have gained acceptance in a multitude of digital devices. Only lower-end "kid cam" digital cameras use embedded flash."
_____________________________________________________________________________________
The Power of Digital Photography
"The digital camera market is currently the biggest consumer market for flash-memory cards. Not surprisingly, the digital camera market follows the PC paradigm, with short product life cycles and almost instantaneous product obsolescence—a wildly different situation than the conventional film-camera market, where the same camera can be sold for a number of years and product improvements are incremental. As with the PC market, flash memory is the key enabling technology for product design and manufacturing."
*************************************************************************************
"CompactFlash is the current marketshare leader for high-performance flash-card form factors.
With the exception of Fuji and Sony, every other digital camera OEM uses CompactFlash."
*************************************************************************************
SmartMedia: A FlashVision LLC Product
"The next most popular format is the SmartMedia card. SmartMedia, however, won't necessarily maintain a significant cost advantage relative to CompactFlash. As the memory density inside a flash card increases, the silicon used to implement the ATA controller shrinks (percentage wise) relative to the silicon dedicated to storage cells. So as capacities increase, the cost per megabyte of CompactFlash approaches that of SmartMedia.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Trifecta: CF, SM and MMC
Another popular format is the MultiMediaCard (MMC). Cellular-phone manufacturers proposed this postage-stamp-sized format to expand the functionality of phone handsets. MMC cards appear in a majority of digital audio players and have heavy backing from Nokia and Ericcson, two of the largest cellular-phone OEMs.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Piracy and Security Issues: SDMC
"In the last year, two new flash card formats have made their debuts.
Both aim to protect digital content from copyright piracy.
Panasonic, one of Sony's major competitors in the consumer space, is quickly trying to win consumers over with its own flash card, the SD Card. Panasonic has aligned itself with SanDisk and Toshiba, two leading flash-memory companies, in preparation for another Beta-vs-VHS battle against Sony."
_____________________________________________________________________________________
The Future: eCommerce and Beyond
"With the public release of digital content fast approaching, the focus is on media security. The SDMI and the SmartCard Consortium have introduced competing security-protection schemes. Both call for a third-party licensing arm for security key authorization and revocation. As encryption technology matures, consumers can also expect secure flash cards to function as cash or smart-card substitutes for financial transactions and POS (point of sale) purchases.
Looking further, the flash card has the potential to combine all the common stand-alone functions that we casually carry around in our wallets—drivers licenses, medical records, insurance information, personal contacts, credit cards, cash, and even pictures of loved ones—in one small yet powerful product. Flash memory is the enabling technology for this future digital dream.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Who does this guy work for anyway???
Ausdauer |
