Patent 7185145 was granted and assigned to Renesas Technology Corp on February, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
It is an object of the invention to improve security of a storage apparatus. The invention has: a flash memory chip; an IC card chip which can execute a security process (encryption, decryption, etc.); and a controller chip for controlling read/write of data from/into the flash memory chip and the IC card chip in response to a request from a host.