The Big SIM To Get A Tryout

摘要

Is the SIM market ready for a card packing a megabyte of memory? Smart cards with mega memory have been talked about before, but except for small government-funded projects in Japan, the 1MB card has largely been the stuff of card vendor fantasy. Now a major wireless network operator, Telecom Italia Mobile, plans to cross the meg-barrier with subscriber identity module cards it intends to issue this year, first to select corporate customers and then to general consumers who authenticate themselves to TIM's planned highspeed, "third-generation" network. The 1MB card-dubbed "SuperSIM" by TIM and its vendors, Switzerland-based chip maker STMicroelectronics and card supplier Oberthur Card Systems of France-will carry by far the most rewriteable memory ever issued on a SIM card. The chip memory is made up almost entirely of flash, which some in the industry expect to replace the staple EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory) in as few as one or two generations of chips. A quarter of the space on the ST chip is a modified flash memory called "page flash," which can be erased in blocks of just 52 bits, or 4 bytes, small enough to make it a viable substitute for EEPROM.