BusinessWire
November 21, 2005 08:13 AM US Pacific Timezone

-40 Degrees to +85 Degrees C CompactFlash Provides High Endurance and Wide Operating Temperature for Industrial Applications

ARLINGTON, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 21, 2005--WinSystems introduces 5 different density CompactFlash (CF) cards that operate from -40 degrees to +85 degrees Centigrade. They are targeted for applications that need industrial-grade reliability, industry-standard compatibility, and IDE hard disk drive emulation for program and data storage. The WinSystems' CF card densities are 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB and they will support WinSystems' single board computers or any other manufacturer's computer that have a CompactFlash socket. Since they are True IDE Mode and ATA-3 compliant, they are compatible with different operating systems such as Linux, Windows(R) CE and Windows(R) XP Embedded without requiring a special driver.

Reliability and performance are key features of WinSystems' CF cards. They are constructed with Samsung NAND-type single-level-cell (SLC) flash memory devices paired with a dedicated 32-bit RISC/DSP-based system controller. "Using the 32-bit RISC/DSP-based system controller, a variety of sophisticated error checking and flash management schemes are employed allowing for levels of reliability and endurance in excess of the physical NAND Flash," said Robert Burckle, Vice-President of WinSystems. "The 32-bit RISC/DSP-based controller applies static and dynamic wear-leveling methods to ensure even wear of flash blocks across the entire card capacity." Background operations track erase counts, prioritize new writes to blocks with lower wear, and relocate static data to blocks with higher wear. Bad-block management routines replace worn blocks with spare blocks reserved by the controller's on-card initialization. Reed-Solomon based ECC algorithms capable of detecting and correcting up to 6 bytes per 512 byte sector are implemented on the fly without performance degradation to ensure data reliability through user data transfers and background wear-leveling operations. This allows the CF cards to have greater than 2 million program/erase cycles and unlimited Reads while maintaining fast transfer speeds of up to 16.6 megabytes/sec in burst mode.

WinSystems' CF cards support a dual 3.3V/5V interface for system flexibility. They meet the CompactFlash Association CFA 2.0/2.1 specification, the PCMCIA PC Card Standard 7.0 (February 1999), and the PCMCIA PC Card ATA Specification 7.0 (February 1999).

Pricing and Availability

Delivery is from stock. List price of the CFLASH-128M-I, the 128MB industrial temperature unit, is $45. For product information, please contact; WinSystems' Application Engineering Group at 715 Stadium Drive, Arlington, Texas 76011, 817-274-7553, e-mail info@winsystems.com and Website http://www.winsystems.com.