Matsushita Electric, SanDisk and Toshiba Agree to Join Forces to Develop and Promote Next Generation Secure Memory Card
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--Aug. 25, 1999-- Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., best known by its Panasonic brand name, SanDisk Corporation and Toshiba Corporation have reached an agreement on comprehensive collaboration to jointly develop, specify and widely promote a next generation secure memory card.
The global market is growing rapidly for flash-memory based removable storage cards. These cards provide a compact, reliable, and easy-to-use medium to store high volumes of visual, audio and other data for digital music players and cameras, personal digital assistants (PDAs), video cameras, cellular phones and other digital consumer electronics products. Several major formats including SmartMedia(TM), CompactFlash(TM) and MultiMediaCard are gaining solid support as leading media to meet these requirements.
The agreement announced today is aimed to jointly develop a small size, high speed read/write next generation memory card capable of providing a high level of copy protection for music, movies and other artistic and commercial content. Each company will aggressively promote development of application products for this card.
Outline of the SD Memory Card:
- Size: 24mm x 32mm x 2.1mm 9 pins
- Capacity: 32MB, 64MB (2000) / 256MB (2001)
- Speed: Target: 10MB/sec / 2MB/sec (2000)
- Features: Powerful security and copy protection (SDMI compliant)
Sampling of the new SD Memory Card will begin in the first quarter of 2000. Production shipments are expected to commence in the second quarter of 2000. It is expected that application products that use the new card will be available in the first half of next year.
