Sony is a pioneer in the development of high-density backup media, focusing on AME (advanced metal evaporated) technology for its magnetic tape drives. A speed advantage is gained by the storage of the log data and indexing information on the cartridge's MIC chip. The MIC information consists of data written at the time of cartridge manufacture, data written when the media is first loaded into an AIT drive, portions updated as part of a read, write or load sequence and finally, portions that can be written directly by a user's application.