History and evolution
of
memory
card
INTRODUCTION
Flash memory is a small, commonly used electronic storage
medium that can be erased and rewritten using electricity. It
can keep data for a long time without needing to be attached
to a power source (its memory is non-volatile, unlike RAM).
NAND and NOR flash memory are two types of flash memory
that use the same underlying technology but read and write
data in significantly different ways.
Digital cameras, mobile phones, laptops, computers, tablets,
PDAs, portable media players, video game consoles, and other
portable electronic devices all utilise flash memory cards. In
general, nowadays it is difficult to go a day without using at
least one device that uses a flash memory card.
The 1980s: In the early 1980s,
Toshiba created NOR-type flash
memory from EEPROM (electrically
erasable programmable read-only
memory)
PC Cards (PCMCIA) were the first commercial
memory card formats introduced in 1990.
Compact Flash I (CF-I) and II (CF-II) are flash
memory mass storage devices that were first
introduced in 1994.
The SD Card Association (SDA) created the
Secure Digital card (SD) memory card format in
1999
In 2003, a smaller variant of the SD card,
the miniSD card, was launched.
SDXC memory cards (Secure Digital Extended
Capacity) were introduced in 2010.
SDUC was introduced in June 2018 and follows in
the footsteps of the original SD, SDHC, and SDXC
cards, boosting maximum storage capacity (from 2
TB to 128 TB) and speed (1.58x compared to the
previous version, to be exact). However, there is no
set date for when these cards will be available for
purchase.