MultiMedia Card gains momentum

MultiMedia Card gains momentum
MUNICH, Germany — The MultiMedia Card is finally taking off, according to Juergen Hammerschmitt, vice president of the MuliMedia Card Project at Siemens Semiconductors.

Developed more than three years ago by Siemens and promoted heavily by the company's partner, SanDisk Corp., the card is winning new adherents. Hitachi Ltd. has joined the pack, and is showing a flash version of the MultiMedia Card at Electronica. SanDisk continues to market a version of the MulitiMedia Card with flash memory, and Siemens sells a version with ROM.

A number of small form factor memory cards now compete in the consumer market, including Toshiba's SmartMedia and Sony's Memory Stick, and Siemens' MultiMedia Card. The MultiMedia Card measures 24 x 32 x 1.4 mm and features a high performance serial interface capable of reading 20 Mbits per second and writing 2 Mbits per second. The three formats are incompatible. Of the three, the MultiMedia Card "is still the smallest and the most robust," said Otto Winkler, marketing manager of Siemens. "Any consumer vendors who need to design a smaller, handheld device will need a smaller storage device like this."

The MultiMedia Card has notched a number of notable design wins. SanDisk's flash version has been designed into Nokia's 9010 GSM communicator and into a pocket-sized Internet music player based on MPEG audio layer 3 that was designed by Pontis, a small German firm. Siemens' ROM version of the card has been designed into story-telling toys, yellow pages and a read-only electronic book designed by a U.S. company, said Hammerschmitt.

Many had thought the technology had arrived before its time when it hit the market 18 months ago, but Siemens said it appears to have found its home. "This is no longer the case that semiconductor companies like us are pushing this card, but our customers are encouraging us to go further," said Hammerschmitt.

Siemens and SanDisk have begun to see an industry building up around the MultiMedia Card over the last several months, especially after Nokia and Ericsson joined the two partners to launch an open, license-free Multimedia Card Association earlier this year.

The association now has 30 members, including Advanced Micro Devices, Canon, Hitachi, ITT Industries, LG Semicon, Motorola, NEC, Qualcomm and Sony. Members are now in the process of signing a contract that will secure a reciprocal grand immunity, which means there will be no blocking patents among them, said Hammerschmitt.

MultiMedia Cards are now available with 2 Mbytes or 8 Mbytes of ROM or with 4 Mbytes or 8-Mbytes of flash. The 8-Mbyte ROM card costs about $6 and the 8-Mbyte flash device costs about $30.

The road map for the MultiMedia Card promises 32-Mbyte memory cards in both flash and ROM by the end of 1999. In principle, the 32-Mbyte flash cards will require a 256-Mbit DRAM process to construct, said Hammerschmitt.

Siemens' MultiMedia Card business unit expects sales of about $299 million in the current fiscal year, up from sales of about $209 million earned last year, Hammerschmitt said.