After more than two years of joint efforts with local tech firms, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) announced yesterday it would launch mass production of a memory card in the third quarter using a homegrown standard.
"miCARD [Multiple Interface Card] will definitely offer local manufacturers an opportunity to grab global market share," said Liu Chih-Yuan (劉智遠), director of ITRI's Internet platform technology division, at a press conference yesterday.
miCARD received approval by the US-based MultimediaCard Association as a new international standard for memory storage cards.
With a small adapter, the storage cards -- measuring 12mm by 21mm by 1.95mm -- could be used to store data in digital cameras or telephones. They could also be slotted into computer universal serial bus (USB) slots for file transfer, without requiring external card readers.
Liu said 600 million portable memory devices are sold globally every year, including USB readers, Secure Digital cards and MultiMediaCards, a market worth US$20 billion, he said.
Within the next five years, miCARDs are expected to represent 20 percent of the market, he said.
Mass production of miCARDs will commence in the third quarter with first-batch memory cards hitting local stores by December, Liu said, adding that the cards would be marketed overseas once gaining ground here.
ITRI said it had applied for miCARD technology patents in the US, Taiwan, China, Japan and the EU.
Local firms were encouraged to join the miCARD bandwagon, ITRI president Johnsee Lee (李鍾熙) said. An advantage to using the card, he said, was that local firms would not have to pay royalties to use or produce miCARDs.
"This will push the standard to a wider adoption," Lee said, adding that local firms pay out approximately US$40 million every year on memory card-related royalties to foreign companies.
The locally developed standard has attracted 12 domestic companies from the upstream through end-product supply chain.
Participating companies include memory module maker Adata Technology Inc (威剛科技), chip packager Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (日月光半導體), as well as handset and portable computer maker Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦).
Asustek was optimistic on miCARD's potential, but said how far the standard
could go would depend on the market uptake during the first few years.
“We will have to wait until the storage cards have matured before bundling
them with our handsets or computers,” said Chin Wu (吳欽智), chief
technology officer at Asustek.
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