Flash format offerings expand, price plummets.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)

EDN, May, 2001 by Dipert, Brian

TOSHIBA HAS UNTIL NOW been a staunch advocate of the SmartMedia (formerly Solid State Floppy Disc) and SD (Secure Digital) card formats, although the company sold its NAND flash-memory chips to third-party CF (CompactFlash) card vendors. Now, however, Toshiba has decided to go into the CF business itself, probably in response both to the format's burgeoning popularity and to the reality of SmartMedia and SD's limited per-module densities (see "Memory cards: designing with a full deck," EDN, May 25, 2000, pg 69). SmartMedia proponents have historically claimed that, due to a lack of an on-card memory controller, their format was capable of the lowest per-megabyte cost, but you wouldn't know it from the price of Toshiba's 512-Mbyte Type 1 CF card: $499--less than a...

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