Multimedia SIM card testing

Since the early days of GSM telecommunications, SIM cards used a tiny amount of memory (128 Kbytes), enough to store a few hundred contacts. Fueled by the miniaturization of memory technology, a new generation of high-capacity SIM cards is coming to market, raising SIM capacity by around 1000 times. High-capacity SIM cards (known as Multimedia SIM cards) can be a two chip System-in-Package (SiP): a secure controller and a NAND flash memory to store multimedia data. NAND flash memory is a very cost effective flash storage medium. However, it has certain characteristics (bad blocks, bad bits...) which mean that it cannot be used as a simple continuous storage array. To provide a high abstraction level of the physical organization of NAND flash memories it is necessary to use an FTL (Flash Translation Layer) software which carefully manages the flash memory while providing a simple logical sector interface to the host system. This paper investigates the SiP system and describes the FTL mechanisms. Testing and personalization issues obtained on these Multimedia SIM cards will be also highlighted.