Mitsubishi Electric Corp is developing what it claims to be the thinnest integrated circuit packaging technology. PTF, paper thin packaging, is 0.5mm thick and said to be specially designed to enable 3.3mm memory cards to be produced with memory capacities greater than hard disk drives. The company says that the new packaging will enable 48 pieces of 8M-bit Mask Read Only Memory to be built into a 48Mb memory card, and 24Mb or 96Mb memory cards can be produced using 4M-bit and 16M-bit DRAMs respectively. Another advantage, according to Mitsubishi, is that integrated circuits offer significantly improved access times than those achieved by magnetic media. No indication of costs, but the Hatfield, Hertfordshire-based subsidiary says that the cards will be available during 1992.
