Thursday, March 13, 2003
SanDisk Introduces The World's Smallest Removable Flash Card For Mobile - the miniSD Card
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 03:30 PM
"SanDisk Corporation (Nasdaq:SNDK) today introduced the SanDisk miniSD(TM) card, a new thumbnail-sized flash memory card that is designed to meet the needs of the mobile phone market for greater storage capacity in the smallest possible physical form factor. The miniSD card was recently adopted by the SD Association as an ultra-small form factor extension to the SD card standard."
"...The miniSD card offers significant savings in card area and volume, two critical design parameters for the new generation of increasingly miniaturized mobile phones. Compared to standard SD cards, the miniSD card saves more than 40% of the printed circuit board area and more than 60% of the volume required to support the card in a portable device. SanDisk will offer a wide range of memory capacities in the new format, with 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 megabytes (MB) expected to ship in 2003. The new card will use SanDisk's NAND flash and SD controller technology."
This looks like a direct response to the miniature MMC cards that were announce a few months ago. I don't think that SD cards need to get any smaller, but the real win here is that the slot for this type of card can be implemented using 60% less space. If this takes off, I bet we'll see Pocket PCs with one full-size SD slot and one miniSD. One for storage, one for input/output options. If they can make a miniSD to SD adaptor, that will complete the loop and make this a valid solution.
"...The miniSD card offers significant savings in card area and volume, two critical design parameters for the new generation of increasingly miniaturized mobile phones. Compared to standard SD cards, the miniSD card saves more than 40% of the printed circuit board area and more than 60% of the volume required to support the card in a portable device. SanDisk will offer a wide range of memory capacities in the new format, with 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 megabytes (MB) expected to ship in 2003. The new card will use SanDisk's NAND flash and SD controller technology."
This looks like a direct response to the miniature MMC cards that were announce a few months ago. I don't think that SD cards need to get any smaller, but the real win here is that the slot for this type of card can be implemented using 60% less space. If this takes off, I bet we'll see Pocket PCs with one full-size SD slot and one miniSD. One for storage, one for input/output options. If they can make a miniSD to SD adaptor, that will complete the loop and make this a valid solution.
