
ASIA
: Samsung announced today that it has developed an extremely small,
low-power multimedia memory card (MMC) for mobile phones. The Samsung
MMCmicro memory card has been designed to overcome a major hurdle
in cell phone design – achieving high performance with a low-power,
removable memory card, now smaller than the size of a thumbnail.
With
dimensions of only 12x14x1.1mm, Samsung's new “MMCmicro”
device is one-third the size of today's common reduced-size multimedia
cards (RS-MMC). Samsung said that the design of its low-power card
makes it easy to incorporate removable memory into progressively smaller
mobile phones. Each card can operate on 1.8 or 3.3 volts of power.
Despite
its exceptionally small size, the Samsung MMCmicro has proven to be
highly reliable in delivering excellent performance through extensive
testing. The card can read at 10MB per second and write at 7MB per
second; a 128MB version can store about 60 5-megapixel digital photographs
or nearly one hour of QVGA-resolution video. Highly durable, the card
can be erased and reused at least 100,000 times and offers an operating
speed between card and system of 26MB per second. With exceptional
storage and performance characteristics, the MMCmicro is designed
to be easily removed from the handset and replaced with a new MMCmciro
card when users decide to upgrade.
Samsung
can stack up to five NAND flash memory devices into each of the new
ultra-smalll memory cards. Initially, they will be sold in 32, 64
and 128 Mbyte sizes.
Research
and analysis firm Gartner, Inc. predicts that demand for MMC cards
will grow at an average of 61% annually through 2007. Samsung is working
on standardizing the “MMCmicro” memory card with the Multimedia
Card Association (MMCA).
Other
Samsung multimedia cards include RS-MMC and MMCmobile for cellular
phones, and MMC and MMCplus versions for digital cameras.
Samsung
will begin mass production of its thumbnail-sized memory cards in
early 2005.