Monday, February 1, 2010

Universal Flash Storage card

The Universal Flash Storage card [UFS] is due to be released in the 4th quarter of 2010. The Universal Flash Storage card would be the 'next generation' in Flash Card. I haven't found to much data on the interface yet, if any. Much of the search results return articles from 2007 when the interface standard was first announced. Other than that I found that the transfer rate would be 3Gbps per lane, which tells me it's a PCIe type of interface with multiple serial lanes. So the new page is blank, that's normal. I'll keep looking for some data, the draft specification should be out on the web......

I would guess that if the standard doesn't come out until the end of this year, I wouldn't expect any Flash cards to appear before mid 2011. However there's always a chance that a company is all ready working on a product, under the assumption that only minor changes will occur to the specification at this point.

Now this is not a computer standard. The specification is really geared to storage applications on a camera or cell phone. But you would still find the interface on a PC as a slot in a Card Reader, or generic flash card reader.

Any way I get to generate a new page, 11 so far this year. I just hope I can find some information on the interface before Google reads that new page and finds it blank.......

Here is a portion of one of those articles from 2007 indicating that Universal Flash Storage could replace the many different flash formats on the market now [which they list]; ".. CompactFlash I, CompactFlash II, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick Micro M2, Multimedia Card, Reduced Size Multimedia Card, MMCmicro Card, Secure Digital Card, miniSD Card, microSD Card, PC Card, xD-Picture Card, Intelligent Stick, Serial Flash Module, ยต card, NT Card, and SmartMedia card .." There does seem to be a few competing formats.