Things of remembrance

Samuel Nakhimovsky, Silicon Storage Technology -- 5/1/2000

Digital evolution has finally hit the mainstream. While only a short while ago only a handful of enthusiasts could find a reason to buy, as well as afford, an IBM PC computer, now millions of computer users are connected to each other through the ubiquitous reach of the Internet.

And the progress is not just limited to computers. Whether we like it or not, every hot consumer product of the past has transitioned into a digital device. The hit products of yesteryear—Walkmans, VCRs, tape decks, television sets, film cameras, and many more—are rapidly being replaced by MP3 players, DVD players, CD-ROMs, HDTVs and digital cameras. And all these new devices belong to the digital domain. As Bill Gates profoundly announced in his keynote speech at the 2000 Consumer Electronics Show, "The new consumer era will no longer be PC centric, but digital content centric."

As our world moves toward a complete digital conversion, we've become swamped with digital data: email, ebooks, digital photos, MPEG videos, MP3 music, and online games. Everything around us seems to have an e-prefix. As the platform processing power is skyrocketing to meet the requirements of this digital age, the burden of performance is falling on the mass data storage.

In the past, all mass data storage solutions were exclusively magnetic—hard disk drives, floppy disks, or magnetic tapes. The need for portable, rugged, low-cost, high-capacity storage pushed the technological envelope, and innovative formats like CD-ROMs and DVDs arrived. While these optical storage formats have achieved tremendous market acceptance, they can't be reused or easily copied. All the way back to LP records, consumers have always looked for ways to duplicate and customize their content to meet their own unique tastes. As the digital-content revolution got going, the need quickly arose for a cost-effective media format that could be read from as well as written to.

Similarly, the large physical dimensions of conventional storage media, such as hard disk drives, floppy drives, and magnetic tapes, prohibited the usage of such bulky devices in smaller, portable applications. So system designers had to think of other solutions for rewritable, low-power, compact media for mass data storage and retrieval.

Hello old friend

Thus engineers rediscovered program flash-memory technology. Although flash originally grew out of the need to store system code within computers (see sidebar, "Memory lane"), engineers now realized that it was a good fit for digital mass storage as well.

Flash can't claim to be the cheapest storage solution in terms of cost per megabyte, but it has secured a permanent position in applications that need more storage than a conventional floppy disk but less storage than the smallest hard disk drive. As a solid-state technology, flash also boasts ruggedness, which has become increasingly important with the rise of portable "digital content centric" consumer products. New devices, such as digital still cameras (DSCs), have embraced flash memory as the technology of choice for mass data storage. While Sony is still trying to extend life to the floppy disk with its Mavica series of cameras, all other major DSC vendors have converted to either internal flash or flash-based memory cards for mass data storage.

Understanding the necessity of flash storage for both program code and mass data storage in a digital camera, system designers had a choice of integrating embedded (permanently attached) or removable flash memory. While embedded flash made the camera design cheaper (you didn't need to include expensive flash-card interface sockets and connectors), it didn't allow for future upgrades. Consumers, however, quickly showed their preference for removable flash cards, which make data exchange easy. In addition, flash cards provide simple operation and the ability to upgrade to higher capacities. So flash cards have gained acceptance in a multitude of digital devices. Only lower-end "kid cam" digital cameras use embedded flash. Most consumer or high-end DSCs have a flash-card design.

The digital camera market is currently the biggest consumer market for flash-memory cards. Not surprisingly, the digital camera market follows the PC paradigm, with short product life cycles and almost instantaneous product obsolescence—a wildly different situation than the conventional film-camera market, where the same camera can be sold for a number of years and product improvements are incremental. As with the PC market, flash memory is the key enabling technology for product design and manufacturing.

A new wave of consumer devices, addressing digital music and video, is about to hit the market. As the Internet market research indicates, "MP3" has become one of the most popular search terms on the Internet, even surpassing "sex" (see "Listen up"). The consumer hunger for cheap, on-the-fly music and video exchanges is unstoppable.

When the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) finalizes its copyright-protection specifications, all the major content powerhouses, such as Sony, EMI, Time-Warner, and others, will open the flood gates and unleash their billions of hours of music, video, and audio files for consumer downloads. MP3 and similar digital content-compression formats support the easy distribution of CD-quality music over the Internet. This innovation will streamline the distribution of digital content and will enable individual consumers to create customized selections to fit their tastes. Some analysts are already pronouncing Christmas 2000 as the year of MP3.

As with digital cameras and the PC before them, all new MP3 platforms include flash memory for program code storage and either embedded flash or flash cards for mass data storage. Since one minute of CD quality music occupies from 0.5 to 1 megabyte of memory (depending on compression algorithm), consumers need about 32 megabytes of memory to store one hour of music. Most MP3 player OEMs leave the capacity option up to the consumer; a flash-card interface allows the consumer to pick from among various capacities of cards.

In the near future, expect to see digital video cameras, digital video players, and digital audio recorders with speech-to-text recognition in the consumer marketplace. All these devices will be enabled by flash-memory technology.

Struggle over shape

Because the digital content market is relatively new, multiple form factors are battling for dominance in the consumer world. In the not-so-distant past, consumers witnessed the fierce battles between 8-track and cassette audio tapes, VHS and Beta video tapes, CDs and MiniDiscs, and Divx and DVDs. The same type of battle is brewing now with flash-card form factors.

CompactFlash is the current marketshare leader for high-performance flash-card form factors. With the exception of Fuji and Sony, every other digital camera OEM uses CompactFlash. The format consists of flash memory and an intelligent ATA controller, which offers standard hard-disk-drive compatibility, in a matchbox-sized card. CompactFlash also offers the fastest data write performance of all flash cards, with Silicon Storage Technology's CompactFlash cards offering up to 1.4 Mbytes/sec sustained write from host to flash. Fast write speed is much cherished by digital camera users, who want to take pictures one after another in the shortest time possible. A number of companies manufacture CompactFlash cards, and consumers can usually find products from a few competitors at any neighborhood high-tech store.

The next most popular format is the SmartMedia card. Thinner than a Lincoln penny, SmartMedia is the cheapest flash-card form factor, since it consists of only flash memory assembled in a removable package. Because SmartMedia consists only of memory, the burden of designing a proper interface falls on the engineer designing the host device.

SmartMedia, however, won't necessarily maintain a significant cost advantage relative to CompactFlash. As the memory density inside a flash card increases, the silicon used to implement the ATA controller shrinks (percentage wise) relative to the silicon dedicated to storage cells. So as capacities increase, the cost per megabyte of CompactFlash approaches that of SmartMedia. Still, SmartMedia has a large following in Japan, where Fuji and Olympus offer multiple digital camera designs and new digital-audio-player platforms using the format.

Another popular format is the MultiMediaCard (MMC). Cellular-phone manufacturers proposed this postage-stamp-sized format to expand the functionality of phone handsets. MMC cards appear in a majority of digital audio players and have heavy backing from Nokia and Ericcson, two of the largest cellular-phone OEMs.

New faces

In the last year, two new flash card formats have made their debuts. Both aim to protect digital content from copyright piracy.

Sony offers a proprietary card form factor in Memory Stick. About the size of a stick of chewing gum, Sony has designed this product into practically every consumer product in its lineup. From desktop and notebook PCs to digital cameras to digital audio players and even game modules, Sony is flexing its marketing muscle to build a whole consumer universe around the Memory Stick. Sony carefully selects few third-party licensees to incorporate the Memory Stick in their products. The Memory Stick includes a proprietary security feature to protect the distribution of copyrighted digital material. With all the music and video intellectual property in its vaults, Sony wants to be sure that when the flood gates open and all the copyrighted material goes out for Internet distribution, the content owners don't suffer from piracy.

Panasonic, one of Sony's major competitors in the consumer space, is quickly trying to win consumers over with its own flash card, the SD Card. Panasonic has aligned itself with SanDisk and Toshiba, two leading flash-memory companies, in preparation for another Beta-vs-VHS battle against Sony. The SD Card is similar to the MMC in both function and form, but offers additional security features for digital-content protection.

With the public release of digital content fast approaching, the focus is on media security. The SDMI and the SmartCard Consortium have introduced competing security-protection schemes. Both call for a third-party licensing arm for security key authorization and revocation. As encryption technology matures, consumers can also expect secure flash cards to function as cash or smart-card substitutes for financial transactions and POS (point of sale) purchases.

Looking further, the flash card has the potential to combine all the common stand-alone functions that we casually carry around in our wallets—drivers licenses, medical records, insurance information, personal contacts, credit cards, cash, and even pictures of loved ones—in one small yet powerful product. Flash memory is the enabling technology for this future digital dream.

In the second half of this year, we'll see a slew of products we've never seen before, such as digital photo picture frames, ebooks, and digital movie cameras and players. All of them will use flash memory and flash cards. So the battle for flash card acceptance is just starting to heat up and will probably rage on for a few years to come. As always when multiple standards face off, some will grow to dominate and others will fall by the wayside. At this time it's too early to pick a winner. Users will be the final judge, jury, and executioner in this consumer trial.

Flash memory has evolved from a specialty product into a mainstream technology and a dominant market force. As the technological curve rapidly progresses following the iron law of Gordon Moore, several things are certain: flash memory capacity will increase, performance will improve, cost will decrease, and further market acceptance with new applications will undoubtedly follow. In this battle for technological dominance the real winners are consumers, who will have a multitude of product choices to fit their personal criteria.

Author info

Samuel Nakhimovsky is a product marketing manager for flash mass storage products at Silicon Storage Technology (www.ssti.com).

Memory lane Flash memory evolved long before the digital consumer devices in which we now find it, and it grew out of different needs than the ones it now serves. Here, a brief history lesson. In 1971 Intel invented the 4004 microprocessor, sparking a revolution that will have longer-lasting impacts on society than the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese Cultural Revolutions combined. The 4004, the ancestor of today's Pentium chips, was a powerful new tool that allowed multiple computer operations to be performed, freeing up the human interface. But in order to utilize this new powerful device a user needed to develop special programs that contained proper sequences of instructions. These instructions, now universally referred to as BIOS (basic input/output system), needed to be stored in a permanent section of memory, where they would be immediately available on system power-up. The appropriate and available semiconductor technology for this purpose at that time was ROM (read only memory). ROM provided prefabricated permanent storage of the BIOS code on the chip and quick fetching of the instructions to the microprocessor. In 1981, IBM introduced its flagship product, the IBM PC. This historic new product appealed to a variety of enthusiasts and hobbyists with its ease of use, low price, and a large number of supporting programs and applications. Soon after, a variety of new peripheral devices became available to support this popular computer architecture. Now, computer customers had the ability to customize their computer systems according to their special needs and desired features. With this product customization, the BIOS code needed to be constantly changed to support all possible system configurations. In light of this, prefabricated ROM proved too restrictive. PC manufacturers needed a more flexible memory choice for BIOS code storage. So engineers applied an existing, popular memory technology: EPROM (electrically programmable read only memory). This technology allowed the memory parts to be manufactured blank, without any preassigned set of instructions. At the end of the PC manufacturing process, the operator would program the EPROMs with the latest and greatest BIOS code, to support all existing external devices. But as the number of available peripherals mushroomed, developing and programming the BIOS code became more and more difficult. At just about that time, Microsoft came out with a major novelty—the Windows operating system. The new graphical interface almost instantly became a consumer favorite and pushed demand for PCs into the millions. In 1994, Microsoft introduced Windows 95, which included another amazing concept, called plug and play. This feature allowed the computer system to be automatically configured every time a new device was added or removed. To support this user-friendly feature, engineers needed yet another semiconductor technology, one that could easily be programmed or erased in-system. This technology was called flash. Flash had all the features of EPROM, but it could be programmed multiple times. Flash and Windows were a perfect fit. Windows provided users with operating simplicity, and flash was the key enabling technology. As computers came to dominate our lives, flash memory technology grew along with them. Flash memory acceptance followed the rapid acceptance of personal computers and computer-related products. Flash's flexibility, economy-of-scale cost reductions, and technological evolution practically eliminated the usage of EPROM and ROM technology in short lifecycle applications. Today, flash memory still serves its original code-storage function, and it thrives in the storage and exchange of digital content. In addition, engineers increasingly use flash memory to build products that can accept software updates and feature improvements in the field. In essence, flash helps such products cheat obsolescence; as standards evolve, downloads allow the product to keep pace, prolonging its usefulness. As more and more consumer devices spend their entire existence connected to the net, this feature will become more widespread.

© 2009, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.