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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64Gbyte high speed memory cards ship in November

Toshiba is planning to ship a new generation of high speed 64Gbyte memory cards aimed at portable multimedia applications to OEMs in November. The new cards uses the SDXC specification with write times of 35Mbytes/s, allowing 2.4GB of video data to download in only 70 seconds and opening up a viable low power system memory.
The new SDXC and new 32Gbyte and 16Gbyte SDHC Memory Cards are the world’s first memory cards compliant with the SD Memory Card Standard Ver. 3.00, UHS104, which brings a new level of high speed read and write speeds to NAND flash based memory cards: a maximum write speed of 35MByte per second, and a read speed of 60MByte per second.
SDXC Memory Card is the next-generation SD Memory Card standard defined by the SD Association in April 2009, in order to meet the ever-growing demand for high-capacity memory media, offering higher transfer rates for content rich storage applications. The new SDXC Memory Card Standard applies to cards with capacities over 32GB and up to 2Terabytes compared to the SDHC standard, which applies to cards with capacities from 4GB to 32GB. Like the move from SD to SDHC, the new cards are only compatible with SDXC readers, not existing SDHC systems.
UHS 104 is the new ultra high speed interface that delivers data at a rate of 104MB/ sec. It is the highest standard in the new SD Memory Card Standard Ver. 3.00.
For a picture see the embedded blog.