Five Reasons Why CFexpress Is Future of Industrial Memory Cards

By Roger Griesemer, GM, memory solutions, Swissbit AG

After Compact Flash and CFast, CFexpress marks the next most important leap forward in the development of industrial memory cards.

But where are the advantages and why does the form factor have the potential to become the ≠1 removable storage media for demanding industrial applications?

Griesemer has compiled 5 arguments:

• 1. Performance
  Originally developed for high-end photography and other consumer applications, CFexpress combines the benefits of a removable storage medium with the performance of a PCIe SSD. With a 2-lane NVMe 1.3 and PCIe Gen 3.1 spec interface, CFexpress achieves up to 1,620MB/s for sequential reads and 840MB/s for sequential writes. The performance increase is particularly evident when compared to the read data rates of Compact Flash cards (120MB/s) and CFast (520MB/s).

• 2. Temperature resistance
  High performance always goes hand in hand with increasing heat development. CFexpress compensates for this supposed shortcoming with a robust metal housing (CFexpress 2.0 type B), which, due to its size (38.5×29.8×3.8mm) and design, enables heat dissipation to make the performance usable. This is particularly important in industrial environments with high temperatures and fanless housings.

• 3. Robustness
  The already mentioned CFexpress 2.0 type B housing offers excellent mechanical protection vs. environmental influences – even in harsh production environments. The construction with covered pins, which are thus protected from touch, makes CFexpress cards almost insensitive to the ingress of dust or moisture and at the same time resistant to vibration.

• 4. Flexibility
  CFexpress can demonstrate its advantages in numerous applications ranging from industrial automation and gaming to transportation and medical technology. This flexibility is promoted by additional properties such as hot-plug capability (replacement during operation) and simple host implementation without bridges or multiplexers in native PCIe host systems.

• 5. Future-proof
  Although SATA is still quite common in some applications and systems, there is no denying the triumph of PCIe. In combination with the NVMe protocol, PCIe is the established SSD storage interface that stands for high bandwidth and low latency. This also applies to the majority of future host controllers, which will rely on PCIe/NVMe by default and thus underline the pioneering positioning of CFexpress as an exchangeable storage medium.

CFexpress is for all applications that require a quick replacement or memory upgrade. The combination of flexibility, robustness and performance makes the format unique. In conjunction with special firmware adjustments, the suitability for industrial use can be further optimized, as is the case with the G-20 series from Swissbit AG, for example.