Industrial Grade SD interface products for high reliability applications

Industrial applications requiring the highest reliability, a small physical size and low pin count interface are well served by Industrial Grade versions of SD interface flash devices.

The vast majority of SD interface flash products in the market are consumer level products – basically great for a mobile phone, but not very reliable in an embedded mission critical application.

By using Industrial Grade instead of commercial or consumer products, high reliability in terms of data integrity, reliability, product longevity are obtained. Industrial Grade flash storage requires the much more reliable and costly SLC NAND memory as well as a controller designed from the ground up for reliability versus cost.

The SD interface is very simple to implement in an embedded design. With a total of 9-pins for SD cards and 8-pins for microSD, there are few traces to connect to the host system. The performance is scalable from as simple as 1-bit SPI, to 1-bit and 4-bit serial SD implementations.

A detailed introduction to the SD Card interface white paper which describes the basics of this interface is available for download in pdf format.

Cactus Technologies has three different offerings to meet the needs of designers using the SD interface in embedded OEM and Industrial systems.

The Industrial Grade SD Card is a 32.0 × 24.0 × 2.1 mm (1.26 × 0.94 × 0.083 inch) packaged flash product intended for use in an SD Card connector.

The Industrial Grade microSD Card is a the smallest form factor with a 15.0 × 11.0 × 1.0 mm (0.59 × 0.43 × 0.039 inch) size. microSD cards also require a host connector for use.

Cactus also offers an embedded Industrial Grade SDChip, which is soldered to the PCB. It is designed in a highly rugged 23.0 x 21.0 x 1.85mm (0.91 x 0.83 x 0.07 inch) BGA module and is ideal for very high shock and vibrations environments.