Removable Mother/Daughter Peripheral Card

Abstract

A peripheral card having a Personal Computer (“PC”) card form factor and removably coupled externally to a host system is further partitioned into a mother card portion and a daughter card portion. The daughter card is removably coupled to the mother card. In the preferred embodiment, a low cost flash “floppy” is accomplished with the daughter card containing only flash EEPROM chips and being controlled by a memory controller residing on the mother card. Other aspects of the invention includes a comprehensive controller on the mother card able to control a predefined set of peripherals on daughter cards connectable to the mother card; relocation of some host resident hardware to the mother card to allow for a minimal host system; a mother card that can accommodate multiple daughter cards; daughter cards that also operates directly with hosts having embedded controllers; daughter cards carrying encoded data and information for decoding it; and daughter cards with security features.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a continuation of application Ser. No. 11 / 463,158, filed Aug. 8, 2006, which is a divisional of application Ser. No. 10 / 050,429, filed May 15, 2002, which in turn is a continuation of application Ser. No. 09 / 887,197, filed Jun. 21, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,381,662, which in turn is a continuation of application Ser. No. 09 / 241,222, filed Feb. 1, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,266,724, which in turn is a continuation of application Ser. No. 08 / 781,539, filed Jan. 9, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,887,145, which in turn is a continuation of application Ser. No. 08 / 462,642, filed Jun. 5, 1995, now abandoned, which in turn is a continuation of application Ser. No. 08 / 398,856, filed Mar. 6, 1995, now abandoned, which in turn is a continuation of application Ser. No. 08 / 151,292, filed Nov. 12, 1993, now abandoned, which in turn is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 08 / 115,428, filed Sep. 1, 1993, now abandoned, which appl...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

This configuration results in a cost-effective, flexible, and reliable memory system that is compact, lightweight, and low-power, allowing for easy expansion of memory capacity and system updates without altering the daughter cards, while maintaining compatibility with standard interfaces.

Problems solved by technology

However, RAM is volatile memory; that is, when power to the computer system is disconnected, data stored in RAM is lost.

However, they are relatively slow, bulky and require high precision moving mechanical parts.

Consequently, they are not rugged and are prone to reliability problems, as well as being slower and consuming significant amounts of power.

Disk drives are obstacles in the quest towards greater portability and lower power consumption of computer systems.

However, ROM and PROM cannot be reprogrammed.

The requirement for additional support hardware (e.g. controller) and software (e.g. microcode or firmware and drivers) in these devices poses issues of cost and inflexibility in memory configuration as well as system updating and upgrading.

For example, when Flash EEPROM PC cards are used to replace magnetic floppies or other removable storage, the additional support hardware to implement the control functions may contribute significantly to the cost and other overhead of the product relative to the memory capacity they provide.

Their support hardware and software tend to add cost, overhead and inflexibility to the final products.

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