NxGn Data Out of Stealth Mode

HQs and offices
Irvine, CA and Hsinchu, Taiwan

Date founded
June 2013

Financial funding
NA

Main executives

Nader Salessi, co-founder and CEO, was formerly VP SSD business unit at WD after working as VP for sTec – acquired last year by WD – during 6 years.
Vladimir Alves, PhD, co-founder and CTO, was previously senior director SSD SoC at WD and director engineering at Morpho Technologies.
Richard Mataya, co-founder and SVP SSD solution, was senior director of SSD hardware engineering at WD and formerly at sTec, Memtech and Bit Micro.
Kamyar Souri, firmware architect, came from WD and sTec.
James File, formerly at Proton Digital Systems, is VP business development of the new firm, after working at Proton Digital Systems, Link-A-Media Devices, Broadcom, Infineon, Seagate and Quantum.

Number of employees
40

Technology
NxGn is developing a new generation of intelligent SSD solutions based on its proprietary SoC controllers and on 18 filed patents. The company believes that, by moving computational tasks closer to where the data resides, its intelligent storage products will improve overall energy efficiency and performance by eliminating storage bandwidth bottlenecks and the high costs associated with data movement. Additionally, solutions are optimized for small form factor cards such as M.2, with its demanding size and power requirements.

Its innovation for enterprise SSD solutions:

Architecture to deliver consistent performance and low power for enterprise environments
Variable Code Rate LDPC based ECC to extract the maximum endurance from flash devices
Signal processing capability enabling the use of MLC and TLC down to 1z-nm geometries
In-storage computation capability: in-situ processing
Software defined media channel architecture enabling flash agnostic SSD solutions
High capacity, low-cost TLC solutions for cold storage SSD

Availability
Introduction to the marketplace at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit, evaluation by a select group of customers in late 2014, fully functional FPGA-based samples in early 2015 followed by final production samples of SoC-based M.2 solutions in late 2015.

Target market
$11 billion enterprise SSD market for hyperscale computing, according to the start-up

Competitors
All the SSD controller companies and there are a lot.