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CompactFlash Card - Celebrating 20-year Anniversary - Still Designed in Industrial Applications

Posted by David Chen on Thursday, 13 Feb 2014

CFA Oversees the CF Card Standard

One of the most widespread Flash Card standards is CompactFlash (CF). Introduced initially by SanDisk in 1994, this format survived multiple generations of specification revisions and is still quite a popular choice in Industrial and some consumer applications. Confined to an most common (Type I) physical dimensions of 43mm × 36mm × 3.3 mm, CompactFlash card is manufactured in capacities of upto 128GBytes and offers sustained performance of up to 200MB/sec.

The CompactFlash standard is governed by the CompactFlash Association (CFA) which manages updates to the standard, oversees device compliance and certifies compliant products. The CompactFlash standard not only incorporates Flash memory based devices, but also HDDs and I/O cards in the same physical form factor. CFA has also announced extensions to the CF spec - CFast (SATA interface CompactFlash card form factor) and XQD (PCIe Interface CompactFlash card form factor).

The original CompactFlash card interface consists of a 50-pin female connector. The proper sequence of signal initialization selects the proper mode of operation between the host and CF card. The CF interface consist of TrueIDE, PCMCIA and I/O modes. The most common usage of CF card in an Industrial Application is to emulate a HDD through a TrueIDE mode.

CompactFlash Card with Write Protect Switch

Over the years, Fortasa Memory Systems, Inc. has developed and marketed six generations of CompactFlash cards.  The standard card capacity offered is from 128MBytes to 128GBytes of storage. We can also modify the controller Firmware to make our card match the default configuration of any other current or legacy CF card. That benefits the user in continuation of supply where the other CF vendors have abandoned this legacy capacity.  In addition, in the latest generation of CF cards we added a hardware Write Protect switch which allows the designer to protect the code and data stored in the card against inadvertent drive accesses or destruction viruses.

Please contact Fortasa directly about our Industrial CompactFlash card offering.