Microsoft has announced a new licensing program for its Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology. For certain device categories, such as cameras, camcorders, and digital photo frames, the software giant is charging a flat $300,000 license fee, while companies that want to use the format in devices such as phones, PCs, and networks will have to pay a volume-based license fee.

The company notes that the exFAT technology is already being adopted by partners in the industry; Redmond has entered into exFAT licensing agreements with several leading companies including Sony, Canon, and Sanyo. Furthermore, SanDisk, as a member of the SD Association and the Memory Stick standard, has endorsed the adoption of the exFAT file system for use in the new extra capacity storage media. The SD Association says it chose the exFAT file system for the SDXC memory card specification because it supports large volumes, large files, and better contiguous on-disk layout. File saving on SDXC cards can reach the full 300MBps speed thanks to exFAT's modern storage allocation techniques.

Microsoft markets exFAT as the modern version of its predecessor, the FAT system, as it can handle larger files on flash memory devices for use of audiovisual media (Microsoft plans to continue to license the older FAT format alongside exFAT). The latest generation of the exFAT file system allows significantly larger files to be stored on a broad range of consumer electronic devices (support for 256TB compared to FAT's 32GB), and improves the speed at which they can be accessed. Microsoft says the file system can handle more than 4,000 RAW images, 100 HD movies, or 60 hours of HD recording in a single directory, and thus calls exFAT an "ideal file system for delivering fast and reliable use of audio and video files." The technology has already been available for some time in Vista SP1 and later, as well as Windows 7, but now the software giant is licensing it broadly to the industry.

In February 2009, news broke that Microsoft had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom, alleging that the device maker's products, including some that are Linux-based, infringe on patents related to Microsoft's FAT32 filesystem. In March 2009, Microsoft and TomTom settled their controversial patent dispute, TomTom licensed the patents from Microsoft, and stated its intent to remove from its Linux kernel the code that is covered by the patents.