Philips gives rivals the blues

By PETER GRIFFIN

A shake-out in the portable storage market is looming.

Consumer electronics giant Philips' development of the optical disk-based Portable Blue standard is threatening to undermine the business models of solid-state rivals Secure Digital, Compact Flash and Memory Stick.

Memory card slots are increasingly present in a wide range of digital cameras, PCs, handheld computers, DVD players and TV sets, but the high cost per megabyte of making solid-state memory has limited take-up of high-capacity cards 512MB and above.

Optical storage is relatively cheap to produce but has been slow in matching the level of miniaturisation of solid-state. A co-developer of the CD with Sony, Philips has been largely absent from the solid-state memory battle, but has been quietly working away on Portable Blue, developing a 3cm rewritable disk the size of a 20c coin but capable of holding 1GB (gigabyte) of data.

A PC card housing for the Portable Blue disks has also been developed and Philips intends to use a storage housing that will fit into existing Compact Flash slots.

Philips displayed Portable Blue prototypes at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin last week.

A Philips Research spokesman said mp3 music files could be played in real time from the disks, which are single-sided. Dual-layered disks are also under development. They will increase capacity to several gigabytes.

While cheap to make, the miniaturised optical drives have higher power requirements than their solid-state alternatives, an issue particularly important to battery-powered portable devices.

Major R&D challenges lie in the realisation of low-power IC-sets and the development of intelligent firmware controlling the mode of operation, a Philips research paper on Portable Blue reads.

The Portable Blue drive includes a tiny optical reading arm in a housing 5mm thick, an extension of Philips Blu-Ray technology.

Philips estimates Portable Blue will yield 10 to 100 times lower cost per MB than solid-state memory. Sony expects to have 200 million Memory Stick-enabled devices sold by 2005 as it battles Matsushita and others for the upper hand in the lucrative storage market.

Meanwhile, Philips has licensed the Memory Stick technology from Sony for use in its Nexperia range of products such as digital TV sets, LCD screens and mobile phones, which incorporate programmable silicon on micro-chips.

It has also cross-licensed the Portable Blue technology to Sony.

* Peter Griffin attended IFA 2003 as a guest of Philips.