The first fruits of the July 1992 Flash memory technology alliance between IBM Corp and Toshiba Corp have finally emerged. IBM’s Microelectronics Division has announced the availabilty of six solid-state PCMCIA-based mass storage cards. IBM’s Solid State File cards use Toshiba’s 16Mbit NAND EEPROM storage and an IBM-designed intelligent microcontroller to provide data transfer rates of up to 7Mbps on read operations and up to 1.2Mbps on write operations. With a capacity of up to 40Mb, they emulate the data storage architecture of a hard disk drive. The cards are designed specifically for disk replacement applications. Toshiba’s Flash architecture stores and retrieves data for an entire sector using parallel write and read operations, to speed up data transfer. IBM’s microcontroller provides the PCMCIA-AT interface, which enables the host system to access the solid state file cards through standard operating system commands intended for IDE hard drives. The mass storage cards are available in 3Mb, 5Mb, 10Mb and 20Mb capacities in a PCMCIA Type I form factor, and 30Mb and 40Mb as a PCMCIA Type II card. In volume, the higher performance cards will cost less than $25 per Megabyte. Toshiba said it is already producing chips in sample quantities, and will now ramp this up to 100,000 units per month; by December, the company expects to be turning out 500,000 a month.
