The list of companies that are supporting a new standards effort for flash memory, announced this week are certainly enough to make the standard happen, called Universal Flash Storage (UFS), but the list has a couple key manufacturers missing from the support list in Intel, Toshiba and Hynix.
Supporting the standard from the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association are handset makers Nokia and Sony Ericsson, and chip makers Samsung, Micron, Spansion, STMicro, and Texas Instruments.
The support of TI, which dominates applications processors in top of the range mobile handsets, and the largest Flash manufacturer in the world in Samsung should bode well for the new standard, and Intel’s partner in NAND Flash, Micron, is already involved as well as ST Micro which has Flash joint ventures with Hynix.
The companies said that the UFS standard would eliminate the need for adapters for various memory cards, offer improved performance, reduce hassle, and possibly reduce prices. That may be so, but prices on Flash memory continue to plummet year on year anyway, and it is companies like SanDisk, which controls much of the US retail flash market, and many controller designs, which comes out with more and more innovative chip structures, always re-inventing the market.
So any standard, and this one is not set to see the light of day until 2009, will be outdated a single generation later, which takes around a year at present, unless it is a form factor designed for continual extension as designs compress more and more memory onto Flash chips. Until we see the support of Samsung’s direct rivals we will be wary that alternative standards might be proposed by the missing companies.
The JEDEC standard is aimed at mobile phones, digital cameras, PDAs and although no-one said it, MP3 players. The aim of the new UFS format is so that very large files can be written and read more rapidly, with even less power consumption than Flash uses today and our guess is that this is all about writing HD video files on and off handsets. JEDEC has members from 290 companies and leads work on Semiconductor standards.