FPGA Implementation of High-Capacity SD Card using VHDL Language

Limitations in capacity of internal memory chips on embedded systems lead to the usage of external memories especially when processing large amount of data as images or videos. FPGAs as embedded system devices used in different signal processing applications require extra memory for data storage. Current attempts in programming Secure Digital (SD) cards as external memories attached to FPGAs came with utilization of aiding application or of shelf tools which consumes large amount of chip clock cycles and reduce the overall performance. In this paper, a hardware implementation of SD card programming is presented by using pure and standalone VHDL code with high programming flexibility. In addition, High-Capacity SD cards (SDHC) are implemented for maximum storage capacity to handle large amount of data.