Micron aims 1.5TB microSD card at video surveillance market

Embedded World Chipmaker Micron is offering a microSD Card for embedded applications with an impressive 1.5TB capacity, enough to hold four months of continuously recorded security camera footage, according to the company.

Announced at the Embedded World 2022 conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Micron's new i400 [PDF] is claimed to be the highest-capacity microSD card yet and was designed with a focus on industrial-grade video security applications.

The device is sampling with potential customers now.

Micron says the video security market is estimated to be worth $83 billion by 2030. In this category applications include corporate fleet dash cameras, smart home security, police body cameras, AI-enabled cameras in factories, and cloud-based video security as a service, or VSaaS.

With its 1.5TB capacity, the i400 microSD card should be a good fit for video storage at the edge and hybrid VSaaS deployments, Micron claims, as it can store up to 120 days of video security footage locally, allowing users to prioritize which data gets uploaded and stored in the cloud.

Beyond security video there are numerous other edge and IoT applications where large volumes of data need to be stored, managed, and analyzed, rather than simply transmitting it all back to a centralized data repository for processing. Micron claims that treating the i400 microSD card as primary storage for edge applications will give users real-time AI analytics and faster decision-making within smart cameras and other devices.

The i400 has a mean time to failure rating of two million hours, and can concurrently handle 4K video recording with "up to eight AI events per second," according to Micron, which presumably means simultaneous access to the data for applications such as object detection and classification for license plate or facial recognition.

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The microSD card is manufactured using Micron's 176-layer 3D NAND process, which the company began using for volume shipments of products towards the end of 2020. Since then, Micron has revealed it has 232-layer 3D NAND under development with a roadmap to delivering chips with 500-plus layers in future, as reported by our sister site Blocks & Files.

Micron also disclosed that its LPDDR5 DRAM embedded chips have received ISO 26262 ASIL D (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) certification for in-vehicle applications such as advanced driver-assistance systems. The certification reduces the burden on automakers by minimizing their need to build in additional mechanisms to mitigate risk, Micron claims. ®