SEOUL (Thomson Financial) - Seven major global chipmakers have reached an
agreement to cooperate with an industry association to create an industry
standard for chips used in cellphones and digital cameras by 2009.
This is a major step towards industry-wide efforts to harmonize various
technology standards and reduce inconvenience for consumers.
In a joint statement released on Friday, the seven chipmakers -- Micron
Technology Inc, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Spansion Inc,
STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments -- said that they would support the
creation of a far-ranging industry specification for removable memory cards and
embedded memory solutions under the leadership of the JEDEC Solid State
Technology Association (JEDEC), a leading open-standards organization in the
semiconductor industry.
The new specification to be focused is dubbed Universal Flash Storage (UFS),
which is designed to meet the industry's need for a universal memory solution
with higher memory capacities and performance.
The UFS will provide a "revolutionary leap" in the industry's efforts to
develop next-generation semiconductor chips that support very low access times
required for memories, enable high-speed access to large multimedia files, and
reduce power-consumption in consumer electronic devices, they said in the
statement.
The target performance level is expected to be a significant advancement
beyond that of the various flash cards popular today.
With the new technology standard, users can access a 90-minute
high-definition movie within a few seconds compared with three minutes at
present.
eunkyung.seo@thomson.com
es/jg
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