Sandisk, allies hatch flash pact

Electronic News, Oct 16, 1995 by Andrew MacLellan

Redwood City, Calif.--A major conflict may be brewing in the flash market as SanDisk Corp., leading a pack of a dozen companies, last week announced here that it has forged a de facto standards association surrounding its CompactFlash (CF) flash mass storage card technology. The CompactFlash Association (CFA) will face heavy competition however from other flash memory market firms, including Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, who are hatching a separate design and specification.

The Santa Clara-based company, formerly known as SunDisk, jointly announced formation of the CompactFlash Association (CFA) with its partners one month after it was revealed that the CF card has been designed into the IBM Palm Top PC110.

Joining SanDisk in the de facto standards group are Apple Computer, Eastman Kodak, Polaroid, Motorola, Canon, Matsushita Electrical Industrial (Panasonic), Seiko Epson, Hewlett-Packard, LG Semicon (formerly Goldstar Electron), Seagate Technology and NEC.

SanDisk claims its CF card is the industry's smallest removable mass storage system and will allow complete interchange of data, images and audio/voice between an array of devices including digital cameras, PDAs, cellular phones, pagers and PCs.

The size of a matchbook and weighing in at half-an-ounce, the 50-pin CF card provides full PCMCIA-ATA functionality but is only a quarter the size of a PCMCIA Type II card. A passive 68-pin adapter card will accept the CF card and can be inserted into existing industry-standard Type II or Type III PC Card ATA slots.

A 2-megabyte CF card will retail for under $100 and store 20-24 images, 30-60 minutes of voice recording or 1,500 pages of double-spaced text. The CF card initially will be sold in 2-, 4-, 10- and 15-megabyte capacities, with a 15MB card costing less than $250.

SanDisk VP of marketing Nelson Chan predicted the CF card will have the capacity to store 100MB by 1997 and up to 500MB by the end of the decade. Present capacities can be effectively doubled with a pre-loaded stacker compression option.

The low-power card consumes less than 5 percent of the power of a typical disk drive and is rugged enough to withstand a shock of 2,000 Gs, Mr. Chan added.

The CF card comes with guaranteed forward-and-backward compatibility and will dynamically support both 3.3V and 5V systems. Production is expected to hit stride in 2Q96 and accompanies a standing invitation for second source fabs to join the CFA standard.

Thomas Kelly, GM of Eastman Kodak's Digital Capture division, will serve as a CFA co-chairman and believes digital cameras utilizing flash memory card technology will augment, though not replace, traditional 35mm film.

"(Eastman Kodak) has considered a variety of alternatives for storing data in a small format and are happy to stand with these companies and recommend to the rest of the industry that CompactFlash is an excellent solution for digital imaging products where small-size format is appropriate," he said.

"We think CompactFlash is the right solution given the versatility and the standardization that this product entails...Clearly, it's very important that the rest of the industry adopt this standard so we can promote the interchange of data from whatever media--whether it's cameras, or sound recorders or data gathering palm top computers--into other sister and brother devices."

While the CFA cadre refers to itself as a group of proven market and technology leaders--with products as diverse as medical instrumentation devices and cell phones--SanDisk competitors in the flash memory market are skeptical the CF card will prove as revolutionary as anticipated.

"This industry has seen too many examples of grand consortiums making hollow predictions, and this seems like another example of that," said Intel flash marketing manager Curt Nichols in an interview with Electronic News. "If you really want to establish an industry standard, you have to ship a great product and you have to ship at low cost and high volume."

To that end, Intel, with an estimated 50.9 percent of the flash market, has brokered an arrangement with AMD, Sharp and Fujitsu to develop the MiniCard and pursue its own flash card memory industry standard. The foursome expect to announce specifications and standards for the new device in 4Q95 and unleash the product in 2Q96.

Because the MiniCard will not rely on ASIC hardware logic, Mr. Nichols said, it will retail for as much as $40 less than the CF card and will make connection to PCMCIA card slots through a rubber pad, rather than pins. At 33mm-by-37mm, it is comparable in size to the CF card.

"The SanDisk philosophy is to use hardware to interface flash media," Mr. Nichols said. "The Intel philosophy is to use software to interface to flash media." He added that, unlike fabless SanDisk, which will manufacture CF cards at plants owned by NEC, Matsushita and LG Semicon, the Intel group has larger production facilities and will rely less on second sourcing, at least initially.

SanDisk's Mr. Chan responded, "I think our card offers a lot of advantages over the MiniCard, number one being that we conform to the industry ATA standard." In addition to being plug-and-play compatible, the CF card will be every bit as cost effective as the MiniCard, Mr. Chan asserted, because of the system's ability to utilize imperfect die.