Trio Slates SD Memory Card Shipments

By TWICE staff -- TWICE, 9/7/1999

Three major consumer electronics manufacturers announced that higher-capacity, secure flash memory cards are soon on the way.

Matsushita, SanDisk and Toshiba introduced the Secure Digital, or "SD," Memory Card last month, saying the new small storage media product would meet consumer and business needs for fast, reliable and secure flash memory cards.

"The SD Memory Card will unleash numerous exciting new consumer products and enable mass distribution of copyrighted content as well as e-commerce in a variety of multimedia, wireless and Internet applications," said Eli Harari, CEO and president of SanDisk.

Yoichi Morishita, president of Matsushita Electric, said his company is looking forward to working with SanDisk and Toshiba on the memory card project. "We are confident that the SD Memory Card will become a virtual standard for digital consumer electronics as well as for PCs," he said. "With this in mind, we intend to develop and build a new generation of digital consumer electronics devices such as Internet music players, digital camcorders and cellular phones which will employ SD Memory Cards."

Sampling of the new card will begin in the first quarter of 2000, and production shipments are expected in the second quarter of the year. Initially, the cards will have 32MB and 64MB capacities. In 2001, the cards are expected to have a 256MB capacity.

The news may be exciting to content providers, CE manufacturers and retailers, but the story of the partners involved is just as interesting. Toshiba holds the patent on SmartMedia cards, one of the most widely used storage media products in digital imaging. SanDisk developed the CompactFlash card, which it now produces and licenses out to other companies for manufacture. It too is used in digital cameras, photo-quality printers and PDAs.

Both kinds of flash media cards have their proponents. And SanDisk and Toshiba never seemed ready to face each other down, even though the setting was perfect for a standards battle. Now the two companies will be working together on the next memory card.

"We welcome this opportunity to collaborate with Matsushita and SanDisk," said Taizo Nishimuro, Toshiba's president /CEO. "Toshiba is the leading supplier of SmartMedia, already established as a de facto standard in digital silicon storage. The new SD Card will be a strong addition to our product portfolio, allowing us to expand our new business opportunities."

The three companies announced some specific goals they have with the cards. A top priority will be to develop products that consider the copyright concerns of software creators and content providers, and the security level of the card has been designed to comply with both current and future SDMI portable device requirements.

The card itself will measure 24mm x 32mm x 1.2mm and will have nine pins.

Several flash memory chips can be stacked in the SD Memory Card, which will provide higher-capacity cards -- so in the future, the cards will be capable of storing movies in video and playback systems. The cards will also feature a mechanical write-protect switch to prevent users from accidentally overwriting a card and destroying data. -- Will Safer