Advantages of a Socketed Industrial Compact Flash Card Design
Many older and current OEM system designs include a socketed Compact Flash card to store the Operating System, Application and other data. There are several advantages to this approach.
[Video overview of Cactus Industrial Grade Compact Flash cards]
Designing flexibility to meet several market needs with one base OEM design makes efficient use of engineering resources. A Compact Flash card socket allows the OEM to:
Decide at the time of manufacture:
- What Capacity (128MB to 64GB),
- What Temperature (0C to 70C or -45C to 90C),
- What Reliability (SLC Compact Flash or MLC Compact Flash)
- Other Characteristics
If a particular vendor goes out of business, has supply issues or reliability begins to suffer, a new vendor’s card can be qualified and the system’s overall design doesn’t need to be modified. While changing vendors may not be the ideal thing to do in the middle of a program’s life, the socketed CF storage device provides the ability change.
The Compact Flash card connector design has proven itself to be reliable in millions of industrial systems over almost twenty years of existence. With shock and vibration specifications of 3000G and 30G respectively Compact Flash cards thrive in harsh environments.
OEMs who want even more piece of mind have connectors with retainer clips or other means to ensure the CF card cannot back out of the socket available.
For Industrial Grade Compact Flash designs with a socketed CF slot, an update to the OS, application and other data can be made by swapping the CF card. For data logging systems, replacing the card provides a quick and easy solution as well.
OEMs concerned with their end customers or others replacing the qualified Compact Flash with another CF card of lesser or unknown reliability/specifications have several methods available to them. The host system can key on a unique manufacturer’s ID, serial number series or other attribute specific to the flash card they are using.
Custom IDs and other attributes can be created for OEMs needing this feature and Cactus can assist where needed. Please contact a Cactus expert for more information.