Samsung announces mass production of world's smallest multimedia cards

Samsung Electronics Co, the leader in advanced semiconductor technology,

announced that it has begun mass-production of the smallest memory card

available for mobile phones. The MMC micro device can read data at 10MBps

(megabytes per second) and write at 7MBps, which is 3.5 times faster than that

of competing flash memory cards.

The new thumbnail-sized memory card, designed specifically for mobile phones

with advanced multimedia features, is one-third as large (12x14x1.1mm) as the

reduced size multimedia card (RS-MMC) available today and can support four NAND

Flash memory chips, enabling higher performance.

Multimedia features are increasingly being added to small mobile phones,

requiring larger memory capacity and a smaller memory footprint — requirements

for which the new MMCmicro device is ideally suited. For example, an external

256MB MMC micro card can hold about 120 photographs with a five-megapixel

resolution or 100 minutes of QVGA-quality video.

The MMC micro can operate on either 3.3 volts or 1.8 volts, cutting power

consumption up to one-sixth that of competing devices. The new Samsung card can

write, read and be erased more than a hundred thousand times.

Samsung's

MMC micro card is available in 32MB, 64MB, 128MB and 256MB versions. The company

also plans to add a 512MB version to the lineup within the next three months. A

2GB card that supports four 4Gb NAND flash memory chips will be introduced in

the first half of 2006.

The high-capacity, low-power MMC micro line represents the next-generation in

flash memory cards, and Samsung officials expect many of the world's leading

mobile phone makers to adopt the format. The cards are already available with

Samsung's latest mobile phones, including its five-megapixel and seven-megapixel

camera phones.

Samsung is working on standardizing "MMC micro" memory card with

the Multimedia Card Association (MMCA).

DQC NEWS BUREAU