Fremont, California maker of Flash memory modules Smart Modular Technologies Inc has introduced a software developers kit for its line of Flash Single In-line Memory Modules. The company reckons that the kit turns any computer into a complete Flash development system and says the kit facilitates writing to Flash memory, which Smart Modular reckons is more difficult than writing to dynamics or statics as it requires special alogorithms. The kit comes with an external PCMCIA reader-writer that attaches to the computer’s parallel port and can handle both newer Flash devices from Intel Corp, as well as older devices from Intel, and those that are Intel-compatible. Smart Modular says the most important bit of the kit is a Type II PCMCIA card with two kinds of 80-pin Flash SIMM connectors; one Joint Electronic Device Engineering Council compatible, the other for other kinds of pinout. The kit comes with the necessary software, but users have to convert the 32-bit-wide file for the Flash SIMM into a 16-bit one to accommodate the card’s data bus. And the company has also enhanced its range of Flash SIMMs so that they now have on-board active reset control, a DC-to-DC voltage converter, and external reset control, and introduced 4Mb and 8Mb SIMMs that use Intel’s embedded Flash RAM integrated circuits. The company says that these last products are aimed at high performance embedded applications where programs or executable files were previously stored in ROMs, or on disk, and downloaded into main memory for operation.
