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Type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Memory storage |
Founded | 1996 |
Founders | John Reimer, Mike Liccardo, Paul Wenz, Petro Estakhri |
Headquarters | San Jose, California, U.S. |
Products | SD card USB flash drives Solid-state drives Flash memory CompactFlash cards Card readers XQD |
Parent | Shenzhen Longsys Electronics Co. (2017-present) |
Website | www |
Lexar International is a brand of flash memory products manufactured by the Chinese memory company Longsys.
The Lexar "JumpDrive" trademark was often used synonymously with the term USB flash drives when the technology was first adopted.
Lexar was founded as an American manufacturer of digital media products based in San Jose, California. Products manufactured by Lexar include SD cards, CompactFlash cards, USB flash drives, card readers and solid-state drives. [1] Once a division of Cirrus Logic, Lexar leveraged its parent company's experience in building ATA controllers in developing its own flash controllers. Lexar was spun off from Cirrus Logic in 1996. [2] Lexar was created by Petro Estakhri and Mike Assar. [3]
In 2005, Lexar was awarded $380 million in a lawsuit against Toshiba who copied Lexar's flash memory technology. [3] [4]
Lexar was acquired by Micron Technology in 2006, [5] and subsequently merged with Crucial Technology under the name Lexar Media, a subsidiary of Micron. In September 2007, Lexar extended its agreement with Eastman Kodak Company to develop and market Kodak-branded flash memory products worldwide. [6]
On June 26, 2017, Micron (the then-owner of the brand) announced it was to discontinue the Lexar retail removable media storage business and put part or all of the business up for sale. [7]
On August 31, 2017, the Lexar brand and trademark rights were acquired by Longsys, a flash memory company based in Shenzhen, China. [8]
In 2018, Lexar reentered the flash storage market. [9]
In January 2019, the company unveiled the first SD card with a storage capacity of 1 terabyte (TB). [10]
In December 2019, Lexar demonstrated a prototype 7.5 GB/s PCIe 4.0 SSD which is set to be the world's fastest consumer SSD. [11] [12]
In April 2020, Lexar released its world's smallest memory card (nCARD) featuring Xtacking tech from Yangtze Memory Technology (YMTC). [13]
In June 2020, Lexar announced its entry to the DRAM market by unveiling seven different DDR4-2666 memory kits for mainstream laptops and desktops. Lexar also plans to release faster, 3000 MHz and 3200 MHz memory kits in the future, along with kits "with heatsinks and RGB lighting", targeting gamers and enthusiasts. [14]
USB FlashCard is a flash memory card format developed by Lexar, and announced on December 13, 2004. [15]
There is a wide range of existing memory card formats such as SD, xD, and CompactFlash; the major advantage of USB FlashCard is that the cards are in fact standard USB flash drives. [16] The USB FlashCard uses a modified USB Type A plug which keeps the total thickness of the card to under 4.5 mm. Because of its small size and USB compatibility, a USB FlashCard could, for example, be accessed by either a digital camera or a modern personal computer without the need for a card reader.
Lexar has published the specifications for its USB FlashCard form factor [16] on its website in an open and royalty-free format, in the hopes that other memory card and portable device manufacturers will adopt it.
The specifications for the USB FlashCard published by Lexar show its dimensions to be 31.75 mm × 12 mm × 4.5 mm. The volume is comparable to the widely adopted SD cards (32 mm × 24 mm × 2.1 mm). The USB FlashCard has nearly the same length as the SD card, but is half as wide, and approximately twice as thick.
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including data storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994.
Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format the SD Association (SDA) developed for use in portable devices.
Micron Technology, Inc. is an American producer of computer memory and computer data storage including dynamic random-access memory, flash memory, and USB flash drives. It is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Its consumer products, including the Ballistix line of memory modules, are marketed under the Crucial brand. Micron and Intel together created IM Flash Technologies, which produced NAND flash memory. It owned Lexar between 2006 and 2017.
The xD-Picture Card is an obsolete form of flash memory card, used in digital cameras made by Olympus, Fujifilm, and Kodak during the 2000s. The xD in the xD-Picture Card stands for eXtreme Digital.
Transcend Information, Inc. is a Taiwanese company headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan that manufactures and distributes memory products. Transcend deals in over 2,000 products including memory modules, flash memory cards, USB flash drives, portable hard drives, multimedia products, solid-state drives, dashcams, body cameras, personal cloud storage, card readers and accessories.
Kingston Technology Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, sells and supports flash memory products, other computer-related memory products, as well as the HyperX gaming division. Headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, United States, Kingston Technology employs more than 3,000 employees worldwide as of Q1 2016. The company has manufacturing and logistics facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Taiwan, and China.
This table provides summary of comparison of various flash memory cards, as of 2017.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functions as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device, or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read-write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks. SSD also has rich internal parallelism for data processing.
G.SKILL International Enterprise is a Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturing company. The company's target customers are overclocking computer users. It produces a variety of high-end PC products and is best known for its DRAM products.
Phison Electronics Corporation is a Taiwanese public electronics company that primarily designs, manufactures and sells controllers for NAND flash memory chips. These are integrated into flash-based products such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and solid-state drives (SSDs).
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The initial NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.
The XQD card is a memory card format primarily developed for flash memory cards. It uses PCI Express as a data transfer interface.
ADATA Technology Co., Ltd. is a Taiwanese fabless memory, storage and computer case manufacturer, founded in May 2001 by Simon Chen (陳立白). Its main product line consists of DRAM modules, USB flash drives, hard disk drives, solid state drives, memory cards and mobile accessories. ADATA is also expanding into new areas, including robotics and electric powertrain systems. In addition to its main ADATA brand, the company also sells PC gaming hardware and accessories under its XPG brand since 2008.
Solid-state storage (SSS) is a type of non-volatile computer storage that stores and retrieves digital information using only electronic circuits, without any involvement of moving mechanical parts. This differs fundamentally from the traditional electromechanical storage, which records data using rotating or linearly moving media coated with magnetic material.
3D XPoint is a discontinued non-volatile memory (NVM) technology developed jointly by Intel and Micron Technology. It was announced in July 2015 and was available on the open market under the brand name Optane (Intel) from April 2017 to July 2022. Bit storage is based on a change of bulk resistance, in conjunction with a stackable cross-grid data access array. Initial prices are less than dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) but more than flash memory.
ATP Electronics was a manufacturer of NAND based storage DRAM modules founded in Silicon Valley in 1991, headquarter was later moved to Taipei, Taiwan. ATP’s product line consist of Industrial grade products, such as SSD, SD / microSD memory cards, along with DRAM products that are used in business industries across Networking, Enterprise Mobility, Automotive industry, Military, IPC/Embedded Systems, Health care, Gaming and The Internet of Things (IoT). Intel's CMTL, one of the largest third party testing lab for Intel server platforms, only recommended two memory modules companies to purchase motherboards in Taiwan, one noted to be ATP Electronics.
CFexpress is a standard for removable media cards proposed by the CompactFlash Association (CFA). The standard uses the NVM Express protocol over an PCIe 3.0 interface with 1 to 4 lanes where 1 GB/s data can be provided per lane. There are multiple form factors that feature different PCIe lane counts. One of the goals is to unify the ecosystem of removable storage by being compatible with standards already widely adopted, such as PCIe and NVMe. There already is a wide range of controllers, software and devices that uses these standards, accelerating adoption.
Kingmax is a Taiwan-based corporate group and manufacturer of RAM modules and memory cards. The principal company of the group is Kingmax Semiconductor Inc. was established in 1989, headquartered in Zhubei City, Hsinchu County, Taiwan, and the group manufactures and offers computer hardware and electronics products all over the world.
The Crucial X8 is an external solid-state drive (SSD) released by Crucial, a subsidiary of Micron Technology. It was released in 2019 and is the first portable flash storage device to be released by Micron after it sold off its previous subsidiary Lexar in 2017.
Longsys [..] today announced that it has acquired the Lexar trademark and branding rights from Micron Technology, Inc.