WinSystems Delivers Industrial Compact Flash

Aug. 12, 2009

Technology editor Bill Wong checks out WinSystem’s line of industrial Compact Flash.

WinSystems is well known for its PC/104-compatible products from single board computers to systems based on new architectures from the Small Form Factor SIG. They also have a line of industrial Compact Flash products like the 1 Gbyte unit (see the figure) we used in one of our NAS projects (see Nice NAS).

The CompactFlash cards re designed for high reliability with -40°C to +85°C operating temperature range. They are available in densities from 128 Mbytes to 16 Gbytes. The cards will work at altitudes up to 80,000 feet and can withstand up to 2000 G's shock and 16.3 G's (rms) of vibration. They are built using Samsung's NAND-type single-level cell (SLC) flash memory.

The cards employ patented static and dynamic wear leveling methods along with bad-block management support. They use Reed-Solomon based ECC algorithms capable of detecting and correcting up to 6 bytes per 512 bytes sector allowing more than 2 million program/erase cycles for the device’s lifetime and unlimited reads while maintaining fast transfer speeds of up to 16.6 Mbytes/s in burst mode.

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.