Faster ExpressCards Shown at CeBIT

HANOVER, GERMANY -- A new standard for PC expansion cards is starting to appear in notebooks, bringing wider bandwidth and standards compliance practices to the thousands of products used to add capabilities to PCs. The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association showed some of the first ExpressCard products, including new notebooks from companies such as Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, IBM, and Toshiba at the CeBIT trade show here this week.

ExpressCard is designed as the successor to the PC Card standard for expansion cards, says Manny Pitta, marketing committee chairman for PCMCIA, a nonprofit standards organization. The standard takes advantage of the new PCI Express interconnect technology and USB 2.0 to improve the bandwidth of peripheral features such as television tuners, Bluetooth adapters, and flash memory cards.

PCI Express and USB 2.0 are becoming standard features on new chip sets from companies like Intel, Nvidia, Silicon Integrated Systems, and Via Technologies.

Smaller Size

The new ExpressCard modules are smaller than the older PC Cards, at just 34 millimeters (1.3 inches) wide, as compared to the 54mm-wide (2.1 inches) PC Cards. Some of the first new ExpressCard products will be 54mm wide at the end of the card that remains visible when plugged into an ExpressCard slot, but the end of the card with the connector pins will be just 34 millimeters wide, Pitta says.

The smaller cards use less power and are less expensive to manufacture, Pitta says. The PCMCIA envisions a gradual move to the 34mm cards, but some current cards require the extra width for the electronics required to run their applications, Pitta says. Examples of ExpressCard products that require the 54mm width include smart card readers, Compact Flash adapters, or even miniature hard drives.

Most of the initial notebooks to feature ExpressCard technology will also come with a PC Card slot, reflecting the enormous number of PC Cards currently in use, Pitta says. Older 54mm-wide PC Cards will not fit in ExpressCard slots. The IBM ThinkPad T43 and Toshiba Tecra S2 come with both slots, and were on display at the PCMCIA booth at CeBIT.

The PCMCIA is also running a more comprehensive compliance program with the move to ExpressCard technology, hoping to avoid some of the interoperability problems that plagued PC cards, Pitta says.

CeBIT runs through Wednesday.

To see PC World's complete CeBIT coverage, check out our CeBIT 2005 news page.