Toshiba aims to standardise WiFi in an SD card

Uses leading position in NAND flash to drive WiFi cards

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Toshiba is to launch an industry forum to promote a new SD card that integrates Wi-Fi wireless communication with data storage capabilities. The "Standard Promotion Forum for Memory Cards Embedding Wireless LAN" (thank goodness the name may change)  has been founded by Toshiba and Singapore-based Trek 2000.

The card is designed to bring Wi-Fi functions to digital still cameras that have an SDHC slot. Once in a camera, a card can recognize and communicate with the same type of card in another camera (on a one-to-one basis), and users can exchange photographs quickly and easily. It also allows users to upload and download photographs to and from a server without any need for a cable connection or transfers of the memory card.

The new card is compliant with the SD memory card standard, supports IEEE 802.11b/g and has an 8-gigabyte capacity. It can transfer both JPEG and RAW images, the two most widely used digital formats.

Toshiba and Trek will invite the participation of digital camera manufacturers and other interested parties in promoting the card, and in exchanges of technical information toward establishing standard specifications and expanding the use of the card.

Features of SD card embedding wireless communications:

1.   The ability to send and receive image data among digital still cameras equipped with an SDHC slot and the card.

2.   Upload and downloads of digital photographs between a digital still camera equipped with an SDHC slot and the card, and in a Wi-Fi environment, and a server.

3.   User management of image transmission and reception minimizes power consumption compared with current solution.

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Tokyo Electron launches ATA interface chip to SD card

Supports High-Speed Data UHS-1 interface with up to 104 Mbyte/second at up to 208MHz
Tokyo Electron Device has launched a chip for bridging the latest high-speed interface standard for SD memory cards and Multi-Media Cards (MMCs) and ATA or CompactFlash interfaces. Sample shipments will start in June.
The move to higher image quality in digital devices has led to memory media with greater capacity and higher data transfer speeds, including high-speed continuous shooting function in digital cameras and long-duration recording of full high definition video in digital movie cameras, so the latest standard for SD memory cards defines the UHS-I interface to support higher speeds (SDR50: 50 Mbyte/s, SDR104: 104 Mbyte/s, DDR50: 50Mbyte/s, etc.).
The inrevium TE4302 is a controller chip that supports UHS-I of the latest SD card standard and MMC DDR mode of MMC standard and has a function for bridging between these media interfaces and other interfaces such as ATA and CF. Supporting SDR104 ,which is the highest bus speed mode of the UHS-I, the LSI maximizes data transfer performance with the new generation of UHS-I SD memory cards.
For multiple applications, the host side interface can be configured to connect to a 32-bit or 16-bit synchronous CPU interface instead of ATA or CF. Also, the media interface supports two channels.
Tokyo Electron is aiming the chip at devices that require high-speed data transfer of high-quality video data such as digital cameras, digital video cameras, televisions, and car navigation systems, but the chipcould also be used to add a solid state disk (SSD) capability using SD cards via the ATA interface as it willsupport SD cards up to 2TBytes. HOwever, it does not support embedded boot execution from the disk at this point.

TE4302 Features

• Media interface: 2 channels 
• Bus width: 1/4 bit 
• Supported bus speed modes: SDR104 / SDR50 / SDR25 / SDR12 / DDR50 / High Speed / Default Speed
• Supported memory capacities: SDXC (64GB to 2TB) / SDHC (4GB to 32GB) / SDSC (up to 2GB) 
• Supports Embedded SD Addendum 2.10 (Boot function is not supported)
• Supports 4-bit asynchronous interrupts specified by SDIO specification Ver. 3.00 (not finalized), supports 8-bit bus with Embedded SDIO
  

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