I am not a techie and not sure how much(if any)relevance this has to AXC. I thought it might be an interesting read for some.
Long AXC!
Start-up Has Created A New Magnetic Storage Approach
(02/24/97; 10:40 a.m. EST)
By Anthony Cataldo, Electronic Buyers News
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- A Silicon Valley start-up is presenting a new challenge to flash
memory vendors with the introduction of a magnetic storage technology that combines the
best low-power, low-cost and high-durability features of flash and magnetic storage.
Cartesian Data Inc. will soon announce that it has developed a prototype for a Type 2 PC
Card storage card that employs many of the same low-cost materials as a hard drive, but
without a rotating disk.
Instead, the company has developed Transverse Memory Technology, a method of reading
and writing data onto a rectangular thin-film substrate using four heads that vibrate and
move laterally on a mechanical arm.
The objective is to make these PC cards more rugged than miniature hard drives with
rotating media, which are vulnerable to damage, while beating solid-state flash memory
cards in price by more than 50 percent. The company is able to keep costs low because it
uses the same materials common in today's hard drives.
Cartesian expects to start producing its first cards in the next nine to 12 months, and has
shown a road map that calls for products with densities of 8 megabytes to 80 MB,
according to analysts.
If the company is able to live up to its promises, it stands to grab a significant market share
from flash cards, which could grow to $1 billion by 2000, according to Semico Research,
Phoenix.
"This can represent sizable competition to the PC Card flash-memory market," said Alan
Niebel, a senior semiconductor analyst with Semico. "They don't have to develop the
infrastructure and design new technology or come up with new ways to test heads or
media. It's already been done in the hard-drive industry."
But flash-card manufacturers said the company has yet to prove its mettle in the market.
Even though Cartesian claimed its cards are more durable than hard drives, competitors
insist there's little chance a card that contains moving parts will be as rugged as a card
stuffed with solid-state semiconductors.
"I doubt you could take anything with a motor and heads, drop it eight feet, and have no
problems," said Leon Malmed, senior vice president of marketing and sales at SanDisk,
has more power consumption associated with it."
And though flash-card vendors say they can't beat disk drives in cost, flash memory
dropped 50 percent in price last year and will fall another 40 percent this year as a result of
die shrinks and higher-density devices, Malmed said.
Additionally, many flash-memory makers said they are hoping to cut costs drastically in
the near future by developing multilevel cell (MLC) designs, which allow individual
memory cells to hold 2 bits of data rather than the usual 1 bit.
"MLC can in a sense drop the price per bit with very little increase in the silicon cost," said
Doug Wong, nonvolatile memory applications engineer at Irvine, Calif.-based Toshiba
America Electronic Components, which is co-developing a 128-megabit flash-memory
device with Samsung that will employ MLC technology by next year.
Several hard-drive companies have tried to offer removable storage devices comparable to
flash cards, but most have faltered because they ended up with products that were either
too costly to build or too fragile, said Phil Devin, a senior analyst with Dataquest, San
Jose, Calif.
But analysts said Cartesian's ability to minimize the shortcomings that dog miniature disk
drives gives the company a real shot in the market. Also, observers point out that the
company's chief executive, James B. Downey, who was president of Read-Rite and
senior vice president of operations at Advanced Micro Devices, has a solid reputation for
running manufacturing operations.
Moreover, Cartesian has garnered more than $10 million from investors since its founding
in 1993, and has a good chance of getting more funding shortly, Semico's Niebel said.
"They appear to have attracted some good money," Dataquest's Devin said. "And they're
in a stage of development that doesn't require large amounts of capital."
He added that the company next will have to seek out a manufacturing partner.
But in the short term, Cartesian will have to spend much of its time convincing customers
that it can produce. "There's still the question of being able to get it out in production
quantities," Niebel said. "I think it's going to require serious evaluation. In the next four to
six months, they should get some samples out there." |
