The world's largest supplier of flash memory cards, SanDisk, foresees Compact Flash cards losing their lead to other emerging storage technologies in two years.
Nelson Chan, senior vice-president and general manager of SanDisk's retail unit, said: 'We've been seeing a lot of momentum behind SD [Secure Digital]. There are more companies joining the SD Association, there are more than 124 products supporting SD out there and we are also shipping a lot of the cards.'
Compact Flash (CF) was developed by SanDisk. The firm supplies all five leading flash memory cards including CF, SD, SmartMedia (SM), MultiMedia Card (MMC) and Sony's Memory Stick.
The company will next month ship an SD card-based product called Cruzer, which it hopes will replace floppy and Zip disks. The Cruzer is a tiny SD card reader that stores and transfers data via USB port. The 128 megabyte (MB) Cruzer will sell at US$99.99.
While the firm still sells more CF products than any other flash memory card, Mr Chan said CF would probably lose its lead by about 2004 and that lead would give way to SD and Memory Stick.
According to the latest report from International Data Corp (IDC) on flash memory card performance worldwide, CF still leads, shipping 15 million units last year. IDC predicts a further 15 million CF cards will be shipped this year, 18 million next year and 20 million in 2004.