Irvine Sensors in Costa Mesa Awarded $300,000 Grant : Computers: Money will fund efforts to stack 256 megabytes of memory onto a credit card-size module.

COSTA MESA — Irvine Sensors said Wednesday it has won a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to prove it can pack the equivalent of a computer’s hard disk drive memory onto a module the size of a credit card.

If the company can show that it can mass-produce the cards, the product could potentially revolutionize personal computing with quantum leaps in speed and memory capacity, said John Stuart, chief financial officer of Irvine Sensors.

“This is an exciting opportunity for us,” he said. “This grant is important so that we can do this research.”

The company said it will try to stack 256 megabytes of memory capacity onto a single card, making it a potential replacement for a hard disk drive. To date, memory cards can easily pack about 10 megabytes, or enough to store about 5,000 single-spaced, typewritten pages.

Irvine Sensors, which has invested more than $30 million in its technology over more than a decade, has developed a technique to stack computer memory chips. Under the grant, the company plans to demonstrate that it can fit a card with 25 times the number of chips now used.

The resulting package still would fit into what is known as a PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Assn.) card.

The chip-stacking technology was developed in conjunction with several defense agencies for military purposes but last year led to the company’s first major alliance in a commercial partnership with IBM.

PCMCIA cards are used extensively in portable computers, including hand-held electronic planners such as the popular Sharp Wizard organizer.

Hard disk drives, which in their portable format are heavier and bulkier than the cards, fit well in machines that weigh five pounds or more. Those disk drives will not disappear anytime soon, but the stacked card Irvine Sensors hopes to manufacture could replace hard disks to give portable computers more memory and make them lighter and faster. At the same time, they would improve the performance of the smallest hand-held computers.