A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using

flash memory Flash memory is an Integrated circuit, electronic Non-volatile memory, non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for t ...

. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices, such as

digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...

s as well as in many early games consoles such as the

Neo Geo The , stylized as NEO•GEO, is a video game platform released in 1990 by Japanese game company SNK Corporation. It was initially released in two ROM cartridge-based formats: an arcade system board (Multi Video System; MVS) and a home video gam ...

. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a socket instead of protruding

USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...

s. Common types of flash memory card include

SD card Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of portable consumer electronics, including dig ...

s (including microSD), Sony's Memory Stick and

CompactFlash CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994. CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the e ...

. , SD cards are the most common type of memory cards.

History

The basis for memory card technology is

. It was invented by

Fujio Masuoka is a Japanese engineer, who has worked for Toshiba and Tohoku University, and is currently chief technical officer (CTO) of Unisantis Electronics. He is best known as the inventor of flash memory, including the development of both the NOR flash ...

Toshiba is a Japanese multinational electronics company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors ...

in 1980 and commercialized by Toshiba in 1987. The development of memory cards was driven in the 1980s by the need for an alternative to floppy disk drives that had lower power consumption, had less weight and occupied less volume in laptops. Some were also marketed as a lower cost alternative to

ROM cartridge A ROM cartridge, usually referred to in context simply as a cartridge, cart, cassette, or card, is a replaceable part designed to be connected to a consumer electronics device such as a home computer, video game console or, to a lesser extent, ...

s. Several competing and incompatible memory card formats were developed by several vendors, such as for example the Bee Card, Astron SoftCards, Sega Cards,

NEC UltraLite The UltraLite is a line of Notebook (laptop), notebook-sized laptops first released by NEC in 1988. The original model was released in October 1988, alongside the heavier and more-capable NEC ProSpeed, ProSpeed. The UltraLite was the first notebo ...

memory cards, and the Mitsubishi Melcard which came in variants using 60 and 50 connector pins. The

Sega Card The Sega Card, known in Japan as Sega My Card, is a memory card format used as game storage for the SG-1000/SC-3000 and the Master System, Mark III / Master System. Produced from 1985 to 1987 by Mitsubishi Plastics, the cards are plugged into on ...

was developed as a cheaper alternative to game cartridges. Some memory cards were used for memory expansion in laptops. JEIDA, the Japan Electronic Industry Development Association, began to work on a standard for memory cards in 1985, and developed the JEIDA memory card in 1986. The

Personal Computer Memory Card International Association The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) was an industry consortium of List of computer hardware manufacturers, computer hardware manufacturers from 1989 to 2009. Starting with the PC Card, PCMCIA card in 1990 (the nam ...

(PCMCIA) was an industry association created in 1989 to promote a standard for memory cards in PCs, and worked closely with JEIDA, adopting their 68 pin connector design. The specification for PCMCIA type I cards, later renamed

PC Card PC Card is a technical standard specifying an expansion card interface for laptops and personal digital assistants, PDAs. The PCMCIA originally introduced the 16-bit Industry Standard Architecture, ISA-based PCMCIA Card in 1990, but renamed it to ...

s, was first released in 1990, and unified the JEIDA memory card standard with the PC Card standard. This format later included support for other devices besides memory cards. PC Card was among the first commercial memory card formats to come out, but is mainly used in industrial applications and to connect I/O devices such as

modem The Democratic Movement (, ; MoDem ) is a centre to centre-right political party in France, whose main ideological trends are liberalism and Christian democracy, and that is characterised by a strong pro-Europeanist stance. MoDem was establis ...

s. Some early memory cards used SRAM as a storage medium, which required a lithium battery to keep the contents in the SRAM. These cards were faster than their flash counterparts. Some of the first PCMCIA cards had capacities of 1 to 5 MB and cost US$100 per MB. Other early cards such as the Bee Card contained non-modifiable

ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...

Write once read many Write once read many (WORM) describes a data storage device in which information, once written, cannot be modified. This write protection affords the assurance that the data cannot be tampered with once it is written to the device, excluding the ...

EPROM An EPROM (rarely EROM), or erasable programmable read-only memory, is a type of programmable read-only memory (PROM) integrated circuit, chip that retains its data when its power supply is switched off. Computer memory that can retrieve stored d ...

or rewriteable

EEPROM EEPROM or E2PROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory) is a type of non-volatile memory. It is used in computers, usually integrated in microcontrollers such as smart cards and remote keyless systems, or as a separate chip d ...

memory. In 1992, SanDisk introduced FlashDisk, a PCMCIA card and one of the first memory cards that did not require battery power to retain its contents, as it used flash memory. In 1994, memory card formats smaller than the PC Card arrived. The first one was

and later

SmartMedia SmartMedia is an obsolete flash memory, flash memory card standard owned by Toshiba, with capacities ranging from 2 MB to 128 MB. The format mostly saw application in the early 2000s in digital cameras and audio production. SmartMedia m ...

and

Miniature Card The Miniature Card or MiniCard is a flash or SRAM memory card standard first promoted by Intel in 1995. The card was backed by Advanced Micro Devices, Fujitsu and Sharp Electronics. They are no longer manufactured. The Miniature Card Implemente ...

. The desire for smaller cards for cell-phones, PDAs, and

compact digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Digital cameras are now ...

s drove a trend that left the previous generation of "compact" cards looking big. In 2000 the SD card was announced. SD was envisioned as a single memory card format for several kinds of electronic devices, that could also function as an expansion slot for adding new capabilities for a device. In 2001, SmartMedia alone captured 50% of the digital camera market and CF had captured the professional digital camera market. However, by 2005, SD and similar MMC cards had nearly taken over SmartMedia's spot, though not to the same level and with stiff competition coming from Memory Stick variants, as well as CompactFlash. In industrial and embedded fields, even the venerable PC card (PCMCIA) memory cards still manage to maintain a niche, while in mobile phones and PDAs, the memory card has become smaller. Initially memory cards were expensive, costing US$3 per megabyte of capacity in 2001; this led to the development of miniaturized rotating disk memory devices such as the Microdrive, PocketZip and Dataplay. The Microdrive had higher capacities than memory cards at the time. All three concepts became obsolete once flash memory prices became lower and their capacities became higher by 2006. New products of Sony (previously only using Memory Stick) and Olympus (previously only using XD-Card) have been offered with an additional SD-Card slot beginning in 2010. Effectively the

format war A format war is a competition between similar but mutually incompatible technical standards that compete for the same market, such as for data storage devices and recording formats for electronic media. It is often characterized by political an ...

has turned in SD-Card's favor."Format-Krieg entschieden: SD-Card setzt sich durch"
(''"format-war resolved: SD-card prevails"''), Chip-online, 14. January 2010

Data table of selected memory card formats

File:SD Cards.JPG,

Secure Digital card Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of portable consumer electronics, including digi ...

(SD) File:MiniSD memory card including adapter.jpg,

MiniSD card Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of portable consumer electronics, including digi ...

with an SD card adapter File:Memory Stick Front and Back.jpg,

Memory Stick The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory, flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage ...

File:Compactflash-512mb.png,

(CF-I) File:Kingston Multi Media Card 32MB front 20040702.jpg,

MultiMediaCard MultiMediaCard, officially abbreviated as MMC, is a memory card standard used for solid-state storage. Unveiled in 1997 by SanDisk and Siemens, MMC is based on a surface-contact low-pin-count serial interface using a single memory stack subs ...

(MMC) File:Smartmedia card closeup.jpg,

File:XD card 16M Fujifilm front.png,

xD-Picture Card The xD-Picture Card is an obsolete flash memory card format, used in digital cameras made by Olympus company, Olympus, Fujifilm, and Kodak between 2002 and 2009. xD cards were manufactured with capacities of 16 megabyte, MB up to 2 gig ...

File:Huawei NM Card.jpg, NM card (a proprietary memory card format created by Huawei) Electronic contacts compared to nano-sim card to the same scale

Overview of all memory card types

*PCMCIA ATA Type I Card (PC Card ATA Type I) **PCMCIA Type II, Type III cards *

Card (Type I), CompactFlash High-Speed *CompactFlash Type II, CF+(CF2.0), CF3.0 **Microdrive *

CFexpress CFexpress is a standard for removable media memory card, cards by the CompactFlash Association (CFA). The standard uses the NVM Express protocol over a PCI Express, PCIe interface. 3 different form factors are available, with 1 to 4 PCI-E lanes ...

*MiniCard (

) (max 64 MB / 64

MiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

) *SmartMedia Card (SSFDC) (max 128 MB) (3.3 V,5 V) *xD-Picture Card, xD-Picture Card Type M *

, MagicGate Memory Stick (max 128 MB); Memory Stick Select, MagicGate Memory Stick Select ("Select" means: 2x128 MB with A/B switch) *SecureMMC *

Secure Digital Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of portable consumer electronics, including digi ...

(SD Card), Secure Digital High-Speed, Secure Digital Plus/Xtra/etc (SD with USB connector) **

miniSD card Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of portable consumer electronics, including digi ...

microSD Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary hardware, proprietary, non-volatile memory, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of port ...

card (aka Transflash, T-Flash, TF) **SDHC **WiFi SD Cards (SD Card With WiFi Card Built in) Powered by Device. (Eye-Fi, WiFi SD, Flash Air) * Nano Memory (NM) card *MU-Flash (Mu-Card) (Mu-Card Alliance of OMIA) *C-Flash * SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module) *

Smart card A smart card (SC), chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC or IC card), is a card used to control access to a resource. It is typically a plastic credit card-sized card with an Embedded system, embedded integrated circuit (IC) chip. Many smart ...

(

ISO/IEC 7810 International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC 7810 ''Identification cards — Physical characteristics'' is an international standard that defines the physical characteristics for identifica ...

ISO/IEC 7816 ISO/IEC 7816 is an international standard related to electronic identification cards with contacts, especially smart cards, and more recently, contactless mobile devices, managed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ...

card standards, etc.) *UFC ( USB FlashCard) (uses

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

) *FISH Universal Transportable Memory Card Standard (uses USB) *Intelligent Stick (iStick, a USB-based flash memory card with MMS) * SxS (S-by-S) memory card, a new memory card specification developed by Sandisk and

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

. SxS complies to the

ExpressCard ExpressCard, initially called NEWCARD, is an interface to connect peripheral, peripheral devices to a computer, usually a laptop, laptop computer. The ExpressCard technical standard specifies the design of slots built into the computer and of expa ...

industry standard. *Nexflash Winbond Serial Flash Module (SFM) cards, size range 1 MB, 2 MB and 4 MB.

Comparison

Video game consoles

Many older

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can typically be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally ...

s used memory cards to hold

saved game A saved game (also called a game save, savegame, savefile, save point, or simply save) is a piece of digitally stored information about the progress of a player in a video game. From the earliest games in the 1970s onward, game platform hardw ...

data. Cartridge-based systems primarily used battery-backed volatile

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

within each individual cartridge to hold saves for that game. Cartridges without this RAM may have used a password system, or would not save progress at all. The Neo Geo AES, released in 1990 by

SNK is a Japanese video gaming and interactive entertainment company. It was founded in 1978 as by Eikichi Kawasaki and began by developing arcade games. SNK is known for its Neo Geo arcade system on which the company established many franchises ...

, was the first video game console able to use a memory card. AES memory cards were also compatible with Neo Geo MVS

arcade cabinet An arcade cabinet, also known as an arcade machine or a coin-op cabinet or coin-op machine, is the housing within which an arcade game's electronic hardware resides. Most cabinets designed since the mid-1980s conform to the Japanese Amusement Ma ...

s, allowing players to migrate saves between home and arcade systems and vice versa. Memory cards became commonplace when home consoles moved to read-only

optical disc An optical disc is a flat, usuallyNon-circular optical discs exist for fashion purposes; see shaped compact disc. disc-shaped object that stores information in the form of physical variations on its surface that can be read with the aid o ...

s for storing the game program, beginning with systems such as the

TurboGrafx-CD The TurboGrafx-16, known in Japan as the , is a home video game console developed by Hudson Soft and manufactured by NEC. It was released in Japan in 1987 and in North America in 1989. The first console of the fourth generation of video game con ...

and

Sega-CD The Sega CD, known as in most regions outside North America and Brazil, is a CD-ROM accessory and format for the Sega Genesis produced by Sega as part of the fourth generation of video game consoles. Originally released in November 1991, it ca ...

. Until the

sixth generation of video game consoles In the history of video games, the sixth generation era (in rare occasions called the 128-bit era; see "bits and system power" below) is the era of computer and video games, video game consoles, and handheld gaming devices available at the turn ...

, memory cards were based on

proprietary format A proprietary file format is a file format of a company, organization, or individual that contains data that is ordered and stored according to a particular encoding-scheme, such that the decoding and interpretation of this stored data is easily ac ...

s; Later systems used established industry formats for memory cards, such as

FAT32 File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers and was the default file system for the MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on ...

. Home consoles commonly use

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

storage for saved games and allow the use of

s or other card formats via a memory card reader to transport game saves and other game information. Though some consoles have implemented

cloud storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which data, said to be on "the cloud", is stored remotely in logical pools and is accessible to users over a network, typically the Internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers (so ...

saving, most portable gaming systems still rely on custom memory cartridges to store program data, due to their low power consumption, smaller physical size and reduced mechanical complexity. File:Neo-Geo-Memory-Card.jpg,

2 KiB memory card File:PSX-Memory-Card.jpg,

PlayStation is a video gaming brand owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

128 KiB memory card File:Sega-Dreamcast-VMU.jpg,

Dreamcast The is the final home video game console manufactured by Sega. It was released in Japan on November 27, 1998, in North America on September 9, 1999 and in Europe on October 14, 1999. It was the first sixth-generation video game console, prec ...

( VMU) 128 KiB memory card File:Nintendo GameCube memory card.png,

GameCube The is a PowerPC-based home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, in Europe on May 3, 2002, and in Australia on May 17, 2002. It is the suc ...

512 KiB memory card File:Xbox-360-512MB-MemCard.jpg,

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the Xbox (console), original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox#Consoles, Xbox series. It was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detail ...

memory card

References