Hitachi and SimpleTech Introduce High-Speed MMC Flash Memory

Hitachi Semiconductor (America) Inc., San Jose, Calif., USA, and SimpleTech Inc., Santa Ana, Calif., announced lines of high-speed MultiMediaCard flash memory devices that each company will market in the United States under its own brand. The 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-MB cards -- developed and manufactured by Hitachi Ltd., Tokyo, Japan -- offer write speeds as high as 2 megabytes per second, which the companies said is an industry first.

The new cards can store digital data -- image files for digital still cameras, music files for MP3 players, and program/data files for other products -- approximately three or six times as fast as earlier-generation MultiMediaCards of equal capacity. They are backward compatible with existing MultiMediaCards and use less power, according to the companies.