Mosaid and Novachips in SSD Controller Joint Development

MOSAID Technologies Inc. and NOVACHIPS Inc. of Korea announced a joint development agreement to design and build an HLNAND (HyperLink NAND) flash controller for SSDs optimized for data center and other memory-intensive applications.

Using a single HLNAND flash controller, an HLSSD will support up to 8TB capacity with a SATA-3 host interface. The controller is scheduled for availability in mid-2013.

"This will be the first ASIC controller to leverage the benefits of HLNAND technology for high-capacity enterprise applications," said Peter Gillingham, VP and CTO, MOSAID. "Our objective is to develop an HLNAND flash controller that will be the most scalable, flexible solution available for system designers."

"HLNAND is pioneering a new market for SSDs by overcoming the limitations of HDDs (hard disk drives) in lifespan, power consumption and capacity," said Daniel Kim, CEO, NOVACHIPS. "We’re excited to be developing HLNAND as an enabling technology for the next-generation of storage media."

The HLNAND flash controller employs multi-cores and will be implemented in 40nm process technology to deliver performance, low-power solutions.

Combining HLNAND flash’s technical benefits with NOVACHIPS’ SSD technology will enable a Terabyte-class SSD controller featuring:

• dual-core with hardware accelerator
• up to 8TB capacity
• SATA 6Gb/s with NCQ
• persistent performance in compressed and non-compressed data
• end-to-end data protection
• full disk encryption with AES-128/256 ECB/CBC/CTR/XTS
• enhanced randomization for data reliability
• smart power management for low- and peak-power control

"With the SSD market rapidly gaining momentum, joint development projects between flash device and controller vendors are critical for quickly bringing advanced products to market," said Jin-Ki Kim, VP, R&D, MOSAID. "NOVACHIPS is an ideal partner for us because of their expertise in hardware and software controller development."

MOSAID is continually demonstrating the superior scalability of its HLNAND technology. Most recently, MOSAID began sampling the industry’s first NAND flash MCP (multi-chip package) with a 16-die NAND stack operating on a single high-performance channel. The 512Gb HLNAND MCP combines a stack of 16 industry standard 32Gb NAND flash die with two HLNAND interface devices to achieve 333MB/s output over a single byte-wide HLNAND interface channel. Conventional NAND flash MCP designs cannot stack more than four NAND dies without suffering from performance degradation, and would require two or more channels to deliver similar throughput.

MOSAID will be presenting a paper and exhibiting at the flash Memory Summit, Aug. 21-23, 2012 in Santa Clara, CA.

About HyperLink (HL) NAND flash
HLNAND flash is a performance solution that combines MOSAID’s own HyperLink memory technology with industry standard NAND flash cell technology to deliver the advanced feature set, reaching sustained I/O bandwidths more than ten times higher than conventional flash.