Two more years for 10.8TB card

Major solid state wait

By Lucy Sherriff • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 14th February 2001 15:24 GMT

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Keele High Density, the intellectual property company formed as a joint venture between Cavendish Resource Management and Keele University, has pushed back the likely arrival date of its ultra-high capacity solid state storage technology yet again.

The company was founded on the basis of research carried out by Ted Williams, Professor Emeritus of Optoelectronics at Keele. It says it is able to squeeze 10.8TB of data onto a solid state memory device the size of a credit card that will cost less than $50 to produce.

We first wrote about Keele High Density back in August of 1999. Last year in October the company made a big noise about the technology, suggesting it would be ready in a year to 18 months.

However, five months on, it looks like it will be a bit later than that. Mike Downey, the MD at CMR, said that while other areas were progressing nicely, the solid state technology would be in engineering for at least another year, more likely two.

The company also developed technology that will allow 475 GB of non-volatile RAM memory on rotating media in same surface area as a DVD disc, and data compression techniques that will increase transmission bandwidth capacity and processing speeds eight times.

Both of these are available to license from KHD now, Downey said. He said that there were "loads" of interested parties, but declined to name any of them. ®