M-Systems and Toshiba to Cooperate on Flash Data Storage Solution

M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd., Toshiba Corporation and Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) announced that they have entered into a strategic agreement regarding cooperation in the area of flash data storage. Under the agreement, Toshiba will become a second source for the DiskOnChip technology. The parties will collaborate to make optimal use of Toshiba's leading flash technology and M-Systems' breakthrough technology for flash data storage.

The DiskOnChip is the optimal implementation of flash disk technology. Unlike older approaches which require a separate host IDE adaptor and an additional ATA controller in the Flash Disk, the DiskOnChip fully emulates a hard disk using a combination of software and hardware, thus providing better features and performance at a lower price. DiskOnChip guarantees high reliability by implementing an advanced on-the-fly hardware level error detection and correction scheme, and a wear-leveling algorithm that guarantees more than 1M write cycles. It also handles bad block marking and remapping, thus providing extremely high reliability Flash Disk solutions.

Designed in more than 180 boards, the DiskOnChip has already established itself as the standard Flash Disk module in the Embedded PC and single board computer markets. The DiskOnChip provides support for a wide range of operating systems, including Windows CE, Windows NT, Windows 95, QNX, pSOS+, VxWorks, DOS and others.