A handful of kit manufacturers got together on Thursday in support of an industry specification for removable memory cards and embedded memory being standardized by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, an open standards organisation in the semiconductor industry.

Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Micron Technology, Spansion, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments are among the backers of the standard.

The new specification, dubbed Universal Flash Storage (UFS), is designed to remove the need for adaptors to accommodate different removable memory card sizes.

Sony Ericsson’s presence in this group is quite interesting to see given that it has continually pushed its in house Memory Stick Duo card format, whereas other players like Nokia and Samsung have followed the microSD card route.

According to the marketing material, UFS will provide a revolutionary leap towards supporting very low access times, as well as enabling high speed access to large multimedia files, while reducing power consumption.

It looks like the forthcoming standard also has its sights set on consumer electronics in general, rather than just the mobile phone market. “UFS is planned to provide consumers in the future with the convenience of a unified removable memory card that can be shared among various mobile, portable and other CE devices without the need for any adaptors,” the organisation said.

The UFS standard is expected to be finalised in 2009.