SanDisk knows those who own high performance digital cameras demand memory cards offering better transfer speeds and storage capacities. The company thinks it can meet that need with its new SanDisk Extreme III 8GB, priced at around $180.

The SanDisk Extreme III 8GB memory card is in the SDHC format and comes bundled with a SanDisk MicroMate SDHC Reader. A typical Extreme III 8GB card can store more than 4,000 high-resolution pictures or up to 16 hours of MPEG 4 video. Transfer speeds are rated at 20MB per second.

How soon do you think the day will be when you can store as many movies to watch on a device smaller than the size of your average flash memory stick as you have on your iPod? 20 years? 10? If the breakthrough that was announced at the University of Pennsylvania is as big as the inventors claim it is, that day may be here before the end of the decade.

Scientists at the U of P have developed a way to create self-assembling nanowires from germanium antimony telluride. These tiny lengths are about 30 to 50 nanometers in diameter and 10 micrometers in length and are made by freezing chemicals at low temperatures, turning them into crystals. The technical stuff is hard to follow but the end result is a revolutionary new form of data storage memory that uses low power consumption (0.7mW per bit), fast read/write times (50 nanoseconds or about 1,000 times faster than the Flash-based memory devices used today) and won’t have any data corruption after 100,000 years of usage.

Sony has unveiled some new very high-speed memory cards designed to work with digital single-lens reflex cameras such as the recently announced Sony DSLR- A700. The 4GB NCFD4G model will price at around $120 while the 8GB NCF8DG sells at around $200.

These new Sony high-speed memory cards join the company’s current line of 66x and 133x-speed models at a rocking 300x. They are CompactFlash in nature and will obviously offer increased processing and response times for those who need it.

SanDisk today announced it would begin making available an 8GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) memory card for use in mobile phones. The cards should be available for use by the end of the year, though no specific price points have been set.

The 8GB SanDisk Memory Stick Micro cards are effectively the largest capacity M2 cards in the world at the moment, according to SanDisk. The cards will allow consumers to listen to more than 2,000 digital songs, store more than 5,000 high-resolution pictures, and view up to 5 hours of MPEG-4 videos.

Moore’s Law seems in jeopardy with some recent memory design innovations by IBM. The new design triples the amount of memory on a microprocessor and marks the fastest access times ever recorded with eDRAM (pictured).

The new eDRAM requires about one-third the space of prior designs and vastly improves microprocessor performance in multi-core designs, graphics for gaming, and networking performance. The new memory also has significantly lower power requirements – needing only one-fifth the standby power of conventional SRAM.

SRAM or Static RAM is a fast volatile memory and preserves data only while continuously powered. SRAM has low power consumption but takes up considerable space on chips. DRAM or Dynamic RAM is commonly used in personal computers as a separate chip. Historically, DRAM has been considered too slow to be integrated directly onto the microprocessor.

IBM presented the breakthrough on-chip …

Solid state disks (SSD) offer a vast improvement over the spinning platters found in conventional hard disk drives. SSDs will help overcome the bottleneck caused by the latency of disk drives and will accelerate applications and lower power consumption. The net benefit of SSD is that consumers will have faster data transfer speeds when reading or writing large files.

Samsung announced today that it has begun sampling its 16Gb NAND Flash memory design with customers. Samsung’s 50nm Flash incorporates a new memory design which uses a 4KB page size, twice the conventional 2KB paging system for NAND flash. The new technology will improve both its read and write features to double the read speed, while increasing write performance 150%.

Samsung is hoping that early market introduction of higher density NAND flash memories will hasten the adoption of flash-based SSDs. Mass production of Samsung’s …

Samsung has announced the successful development of the industry’s first one gigabit Mobile DRAM for mobile products using 80nm process technology. The new chip is expected be more cost effective than other current solutions and can be used for a variety of mobile applications as well as for digital cameras, portable media players and portable gaming devices.

The new DRAM is an attractive choice for mobile applications as the electric current drops a full 30 percent when compared to the double-die stack, 1Gb memory solution widely used today. In addition, the new 1Gb Mobile DRAM chip introduces a new temperature-sensing feature that reduces power drain in standby mode by 30 percent over conventional memory chip designs.

The new chip has a more compact form factor, making it at least 20 percent thinner than a multi-stack package of 512Mb dies. The …

Samsung today announced a new prototype fusion memory chip named OneDRAM that can significantly increase the data processing speed between processors in mobile applications.

The use of two separate processors – a communication processor and a media processor in mobile devices is becoming increasingly prevalent due to rapidly increasing demand for multimedia features. Two processors typically means that two memory buffers are required and sharply increases the time that it takes to transfer data between processors.

The new OneDRAM solution can eliminate the need for two memory buffers in high-end smartphones and other multimedia devices as it can route data between the processors with a single chip.

The new memory solution is expected to be incorporated into the design of handsets, game consoles and in other digital applications, especially those that require 3-dimensional graphics.

Along with the faster data processing speeds between the processors, the OneDRAM reduces power …

Hynix, a Korean memory semiconductor supplier, today announced it has developed what it claims to be the worlds fastest and smallest 512Mb mobile DRAM. Meeting the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) standards and operating at 200MHz, it is the fastest in the industry.

The Hynix 512Mb mobile DDR SDRAM processes 1.6Gbytes of data per second, making it approximately 1.5 times faster than speed of the company’s existing mobile DRAM line.

This speedy memory is sure to boost Hynix’s competitiveness in mobile applications as the trend towards miniaturization (8mm x 10mm) continues. Hynix is expected to combine 512Mb mobile DRAM and NAND Flash modules into a multi-chip package that will further enable the design of slimmer mobile phones.

“The product will deliver the memory capacity and speed required for third generation mobile phones that provide new services, such as DMB (Digital Media Broadcast), to

…

SanDisk Corporation recently announced the 12 and 16GB SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards. This announcement makes these new cards the highest capacity cards in the world. The new large-capacity cards are targeted towards professional photographers who shoot RAW or high-resolution JPG files and need the performance and capacity to capture these massive files.

The new cards will have minimum write and read speeds of 20 megabytes per second (MB/sec.). The cards are expected to ship to photo retailers by the end of the year. The announcement was made at the Photokina trade show where SanDisk is demonstrating products in Hall 6, Stand D78/E79.

SanDisk Extreme III cards are available in CompactFlash, Memory Stick PRO Duo and SD card formats. Suggested retail prices for the two new capacities are $779.99 (USD) for the 12GB and $1,049.99 for the 16GB model….

Samsung has released new 32GB NAND flash memory with smaller circuit elements of only 40 nanometers wide. The company said this new design enables them to scale better to continue to make larger and larger memory cards and continue to keep the overall size down and performance up.

What this means for the rest of us is the ability to hold over 64 hours of DVD movies or over 1300 hours of MP3 songs on one small flash drive of up to 64 GB. Some may say that this is a little much, but I remember years ago thinking that my 3GB harddrive was more room that I would ever use!

Along with scalability, Samsung says that the reliability of the memory will be increased as well due to the new structure. Reliability becomes increasingly important to me at the same rate as …

The Sony Micro Vault with Virtual Expander is a flash memory device with a USB 2.0 compatible interface. They are tiny little devices with memory ranges from 256MB up to 2G. (Early press releases state memory up to 4G but I was unable to find any Micro Vault’s that actually have 4G for sale anywhere.)

They come in a handfull of different flashy colors and you can also get a small carrying case that hooks on a keychain or on to a notebook with a clip.

The Virtual Expander software is utility that compresses and decompresses data that is placed on the device, sometimes to as little as 1/3 it’s original size. This makes a 2G drive potentially able to hold 6G of compressed data.

Tiny USB drive gadgets like this are extremely handy to carry data with you, such as any spreadsheets or …