ATP SD Trio Professional Plus

Introduction

ATP is a company specialized in flash memories, carrying a full line of flash memory cards. They have a very innovative manufacturing process that makes all their memory cards waterproof, shock proof, ESD proof and resistant to extreme temperatures. They also have a very innovative SD card set, called SD Trio Professional Plus, which comes with one micro SD card and two adapters to transform this card into a mini SD or into a regular SD card – which is great, as your don’t need to worry about which SD format your device accepts –, plus a USB reader. Let’s take a look at this combo.

Before talking about the SD Trio Professional Plus itself, let’s talk a little bit more about ATP. They have their own factory in Taiwan and they cut the flash memory wafers by themselves. The wafers are provided by Samsung. So how come that ATP is not so well known? In fact their focus is mainly on the OEM business, i.e., they manufacture flash memory cards for other companies that only post their label on ATP products, including big names on the digital camera business.

All their cards use an innovative manufacturing process, where all components are protected inside the same packaging. In Figure 1 you can compare a regular memory card to ATP’s. As you can see, on a regular memory card the chips and all other components exposed, so the card can go defective if water enters it. On ATP manufacturing process all components are packed under the same packaging.

Figure 1: A traditional memory card on the left and ATP memory card on the right.

In Figure 2 we can have a better idea on how this packaging is accomplished. On the left side you can see that instead of using regular chips ATP adds the chips without their packaging to the printed circuit board. Then a single packaging is applied to all components. You can see in Figure 2 two memory chips and the memory controller on the top. According to ATP they can also stack chips (i.e., solder one chip on top of another chip) in order to achieve higher capacities, up to four layers. Thus they can have a memory card with up to eight chips inside (four chips x 2).

Figure 2: Memory card components without their packaging.

In Figure 3, you can see the SD Trio Professional Plus package (we took this picture when the product was still called “MicroSD/Reader Combo”; ATP has recently changed the name of this product to “SD Trio Professional Plus”, so the package you will get may be different from Figure 3). ATP is also going to release the same product without the USB reader as “Universal SD”.

Figure 3: MicroSD/Reader Combo package.

Let’s now talk more about SD Trio Professional Plus from ATP.