Secure Digital Memory Cards Market Expands

By Sounni de Fontenay (more articles from this author) 1999-09-08

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It was announced on August 25th that Matsushita Electronic, SanDisk, and Toshiba have formed a partnership to bring the next generation of memory cards to the forefront. The collaboration will seek to jointly develop a small size, high speed read/write next generation memory card. An integral feature of these memory cards will be copyright protection, which will take into account content providers and software creators. The agreement provides for the extensive marketing of the next generation memory card technology to make it an industry standard through licensing and the development of peripheral applications. Matsushita has already announced the planned release of a portable audio player in early 2000. The memory card in development is about half the size of a credit card and will have capacity of 32MB and 64MD, reaching 256MB in 2001. It will have read/write speeds of 10MB/sec and 2MB/sec and will be compliant will all future SDMI portable devices.

Matsushita, also know through its brand name, Panasonic, is a developer and manufacturer of digital consumer electronic products. SanDisk Corporation, based in Sunnyvale, CA, is a supplier of flash data storage products. The Toshiba Corporation specializes in the development of multimedia components, products and systems.

"Matsushita Electric and the Panasonic companies are delighted to be a partner in this effort to develop a technology that adds new value and features to the products consumers will use in the home, the workplace and everywhere in between," said Yoichi Morishita, president of Matsushita Electric. "With the progress of recent digital network technology we are confident that the SD Memory Card will become a virtual standard for digital consumer electronics as well as for PC's."

Eli Harari, CEO and president of SanDisk, said, "The sophisticated security of 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 and wireless/internet applications. The SD Memory Card provides an easy migration path for users of the highly successful MultiMediaCard for new applications requiring a high level of copyright protection and data security."

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