CompactFlash Card Hits a Higher Speed

Renesas Technology, the joint-venture semiconductor company formed by Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric, has begun shipping samples of a CompactFlash memory card that, the company says, has a write speed faster than that of any other CF card on the market.

The card, which has the unwieldy name of HB28J1000CCC, is a Type I CF card, contains 1GB of memory and supports a data writing at up to 10MB per second. That compares favorably against competing cards, such as SanDisk's Ultra CF cards at 2.8MB per second and Lexar Media write-accelerated cards at 6MB per second.

Renesas was able to increase write speed by processing data in parallel to each of the eight 1 gigabit memory chips inside the card, it said. The cards also support the CompactFlash Association's version 2.0 standard which raises the maximum speed at which data can travel between the card and device from 8MB per second to 16MB per second.

Coming Soon

Renesas plans to begin commercial production of the cards in December this year and expects then to be available to end users during the first half of 2004. Renesas will sell them under its own brand via its Web site and will supply them to other vendors for them to sell under their respective brands.

The end-user price is expected to be around $310, said Chieko Yoda, a spokesperson for Renesas in Tokyo.

The cards are aimed at professional users such as news and sports photographers, who often take a number of high-resolution photos in quick succession and might face problems waiting for them to be written to the memory card. The cards could also be used for high-bandwidth video applications.

The company has also developed a 4GB PC Card that packs 32 of the 1 gigabit memory chips into a Type II case, which is less than two-tenths of an inch thick, and plans to begin sample shipments during the first half of 2004, it said.

New and Improved

Renesas' new CF card is one of several innovations in the form factor that have been announced recently.

Lexar Media began shipping a 4GB Type II CF card earlier this year that supports the FAT32 addressing system. Until now almost all cards and the devices that they are used with have supported FAT16, which means no more than 2GB of memory can be addressed. By switching to FAT32 the Lexar card gets past this hurdle. However, similar support in the host device is also required in order to access the full memory capacity, and such devices are still few in number.

SanDisk is also planning to ship a 4GB CF card, although it has delayed the shipping date from the fourth quarter of this year to January 2004, according to Bob Goligoski, a company spokesperson. The Sandisk card will be a Type I CF card, which is thinner than the Type II card that Lexar is shipping and for which slots are more common on devices.

Hitachi has also just begun selling a 4GB version of its Microdrive, which is a 1-inch hard drive in a CF case. The card went on sale this month and costs $500. A 2GB version is also due in December.