An article talking about the future of flash storage - really advocating MMC but didn't say to much positive information on the older CF.
-Jay
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Flash Isn't Yet In The Cards For Handhelds
(02/25/98; 1:39 p.m. EST)
By Rick Boyd-Merritt and Terry Costlow, EE Times
Standard flash cards have yet to gain a significant hold
among handheld computers, but SanDisk, whose flash cards
have gained some footing among digital-camera makers, said
it hopes to increase its position in the handheld market with a
new format developed specifically for handheld computers
and smart phones. Last year, SanDisk partnered with
Germany's Siemens AG to bring out the Multimedia Card
(MMC) and aimed it specifically at smart phones and pagers.
Like the competing Miniature Cards -- which are backed by
flash-chip heavyweights Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, and
Fujitsu -- the MMC format will support ROM and dynamic
RAM as well as flash cards. But also like MMC, the
Miniature Card hasn't established much of a presence in
handheld PCs, said Diana Hwang, a mobile analyst with
International Data, in Framingham, Mass. So far, Philips
Electronics is using the cards in its Velo handheld device,
which runs Windows CE 2.0.
SanDisk said it hopes its tailored format will find a new home
among smart phones, pagers, and handhelds. "We went to
the cellular-phone people and asked them why they weren't
using the CompactFlash [SanDisk's previous flash card].
They said it's too big," said Nelson Chan, marketing vice
president at SanDisk, in Santa Clara, Calif.
"The Multimedia Card is designed for mobile
communications. We think that just like there are
different-sized batteries for different types of products, there
can be different sizes of flash cards for different
applications," Chan said.
Flash Cards Aren't A Necessity
But while batteries are a necessity, flash cards are an option.
And in many instances, they're an option that has seen
limited acceptance. Just as removable flash cartridges haven't
taken the camera industry by storm, their smaller brethren
haven't altered the landscape of handheld computers and
communicators.
"Today, our products all have memory cards in them, but
they don't conform to any standard," said Jeff Hawkins, chief
technology officer of the Palm Computing division of 3Com,
in Santa Clara, Calif., which designed the PalmPilot handheld
computer. "They are just little proprietary cards that use an
off-the-shelf U-shaped edge connector and a 1-by-2-inch
board."
Palm uses a proprietary 1-megabyte ROM and pseudo-static
RAM card to upgrade systems software and RAM on the
device. Flash may be used in the future, but not any standard
flash card, Hawkins said. Indeed, Hawkins, something of an
iconoclast among mobile-systems designers, said he doesn't
believe there needs to be a standard for removable flash
cards, and he doesn't think the product concept as a whole
makes much sense either.
"The whole idea of things in a mobile device being easily
removable is foreign to me," Hawkins said. "If I have all my
memory in a device, I don't want someone walking up to it
and pulling it out.
"The idea of interchangeability doesn't always work," he
added. "That was the whole point of PCMCIA, but
PCMCIA was too big, didn't offer great enough compatibility,
and it used too much power, especially for a handheld device.
Three years ago, everyone said you have to have PCMCIA,
but that turned out not to be the answer."
At a time when smart phones and other handheld devices are
still emerging, Hawkins said there doesn't need to be a
standard flash card -- at least not yet. "The form factor of
these devices will change rapidly, and it's too early to lock it
into one thing and say, 'This is it,' " he said. "That's what
happened to PCMCIA."
Hawkins also takes issue with what CompactFlash advocates
say is one of the big advantages of that approach -- the use
of a hard disk drive's Integrated Drive Electronics/At
Attachment (IDE/ATA) interface. "That's great if you have a
typical PC architecture with a two-tiered memory system of
RAM main memory and a hard disk," he said. "But I don't
think that's the right approach for a handheld. The PalmPilot
is a single-tiered memory system, which makes it both
cheaper and faster."
The use of the ATA interface requires an on-board controller
on the CompactFlash card that involves some cost overhead,
opponents say. However, the Miniature card uses Flash
Translation Layer software that must be run on the host
system with appropriate drivers, which incurs its own added
complexity in design, others counter. In terms of the absolute
lowest-cost card format, "Toshiba's SmartMedia has an
advantage at lower densities because it does not have a
controller [like CompactFlash], but the single-chip
architecture has been limited to 8 MB," said Clay A.
Dunsmore, a senior product engineer at Kodak Japan.
Kodak Embraces ATA
Still, Jeff Peters, general manager of Kodak's digital-imaging
business unit, said Kodak is happy to embrace the ATA
interface in its digital cameras. "To me, it's reassuring to know
there is a widely used standard interface like ATA that
guarantees compatibility," said Peters. "I'm not worried about
it being the PC's 'baggage' because digital cameras these
days are using processors that have plenty of overhead to
deal with such issues."
Hawkins said flash cards might have more of a life in smart
phones, where they could be used to let users bring their
phone numbers and personal account information from one
phone to the next. Palm is working with Qualcomm of San
Diego on a line of smart phones that will use a new
data-over-CDMA technology Qualcomm has developed. The
phones are expected to ship by the end of the year.
"At this point, we are still evaluating the options and
evaluating how and in what products to use removable
flash," said Gina Lombardi, vice president of product
development for the subscriber products group at Qualcomm.
The company is one of several cellular-phone companies that
have announced they will support SanDisk's MMC format for
flash cards aimed at smart phones and pagers. |
