September 1999, Issue 110

Get Smart Media—(Part 1):
What's It All About?

SSFDC

The Solid State Floppy Disk Card Forum is a voluntary organization intended to promote SmartMedia. SmartMedia consists of a removable NAND flash-memory card that claims to be the lightest, thinnest, and cheapest of its kind in the world.

It weighs in at 2 g (less than 0.1 oz). SmartMedia is about the size of a matchbook, but with a much thinner width of 0.76 mm (less than 0.03¢). Compared to a PCMCIA memory card of the same capacity, SmartMedia is about two-thirds of the cost.

Probably the most curious thing about SmartMedia is the contact configuration (see Photo 1). The 22 contacts are arranged in two rows of 11, all embedded into the top surface of the device.

Photo 1—The SmartMedia shown here on top of the 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" diskettes look like toys, but each one holds many times the capacity of their predecessors.

When you see that power and ground use up 6 contacts, you start wondering how any kind of meaningful storage can be accomplished via the remaining contacts. The remaining contacts are shared by the I/O and control signals.

Treating the physical interface as an I/O device simplifies and standardizes the interface, but does make it a bit more difficult to use. Connections remain identical for any capacity of SmartMedia card.

Although SmartMedia’s largest application is presently with digital cameras, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Additional applications include PDAs, electronic musical instruments, voice recorders, and portable terminals. Practically any equipment that uses removable memory is a good candidate for SmartMedia.