GoKawiilTOKYO — Aiming to create a de facto standard in the harshly competitive memory card market, backers of the SmartMedia card have opened its interface specification and made it available free of charge. The move is designed to give the flash memory card format, initially spearheaded by Toshiba Corp., an edge as it competes for slots in digital cameras, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices.
The Solid State Floppy Disk Card (SSFDC) Forum published SmartMedia's interface specification, dubbed Smil (for “smart media interface library”), in English and in Japanese on its home page on Aug. 8, and has reportedly downloaded more than 5,000 copies of the spec since then.
Smil is sectioned into three parts for hardware, software and a Windows driver. The hardware section includes a VHDL description that can be used as a macrocell when manufacturers design gate arrays for the SmartMedia interface. The small-scale gate array comprises about 200 gates. The software section includes source code to drive the interface and to aid users in porting the code to their own firmware.
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Toshiba owns the interface specification's intellectual property. But Hiroshi Iwasaki, senior manager of Toshiba's media card strategic planning group, said, “The company has no intention of collecting license fees. It is open to users so long as they use it properly.” Toshiba hopes SmartMedia “will become the de facto standard in the media card market,” he said.
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The SSFDC Forum was ready to open the specification about two years ago. But it took time to reach a consensus among forum members, especially the software vendors that develop SmartMedia-related software such as controllers, said Patrick Ohara, chairman of the forum's technical committee.
Advocates argued that an open specification would pump up software vendors' business because the increased number of users would still need support. The software vendors finally agreed, said Ohara.
The SmartMedia card measures 37 x 45 x 0.76 mm and has 22 I/O pins but no controller. It was among the first media cards launched and has been competing with SanDisk's CompactFlash cards and Sony's Memory Stick in the digital still camera market.
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