Memory cards come in all shapes and sizes. There's Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard (MMC), CompactFlash, miniSD, xD, SmartMedia, TransFlash, Memory Stick, and Memory Stick Duo to name a few of the more common types.

If you think the memory hungry and format saturated electronics market would simply prefer to support higher capacities and faster performance from current storage types rather than, say, a new kind of card, a consortium of Taiwanese companies would say you're wrong. These vendors have gotten together to propose yet another format.

The new alliance asserts their new specification, christened M¼-Cards (micro ¼ card), offers a number of advantages over Secure Digital (SD)—by far the most popular kind of flash memory.

First, they'll be simpler and cheaper to make. That's because M¼-Cards leverage the common USB 2.0 specification for input/output. M¼-Cards will also transfer data at twice the speed of USB, while consuming a third to a fourth less power.

Alliance member C-One Technology (maker of Pretec brand SD cards) president Gordon Yu recently told EE Times, "The SD I/O is not so easily used. It requires a lot of effort to develop, especially in terms of software."

To help M¼-Cards find a niche, the consortium plans to make them compatible with SD/MMC slots. That's an important decision, as hundreds of different products leverage SD/MMC.

By being SD/MMC slot compatible, the alliance ups its format's chances of succeeding considerably. One caveat, to use the cards with SD slots you'll need to load special driver software.

M¼-Cards are still a ways off from finding their way to a PDA, smartphone, cell phone, or an MP3 player in your hand. The M¼-Card Alliance currently only includes the creators of the specification for the format. It plans to open itself up to new members in the near future, however, asserting 40 companies have already expressed in joining.