Link_A_Media Devices Secures $16 Million in Series D Funding

Link_A_Media Devices, Inc., in the development of semiconductor SoC solutions for the data storage market, secured $16 million in Series D funding. Investors included ITOCHU Technology Ventures, Keynote Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SunAmerica Ventures and several strategic partners.

The funding will be used to accelerate the development and commercialization of new products and expand the current customer base.

Link_A_Media has led the adoption of low-density parity check (LDPC) technology in the mobile HDD market, where power consumption, performance, and cost requirements are paramount. Its LDPC-based SOC products have been shipping in 2.5-inch HDD products since last year.

John Rydning, IDC’s research director for HDDs, confirmed that Link_A_Media is the first new SOC supplier to enter the HDD market in more than 16 years.

Link_A_Media also designs custom SOC SSD controllers based on their high performance and scalable NAND controller platform, FlashLINK2. These controllers address a range of NAND Flash applications from low power mobile products to high performance enterprise SSDs. Link_A_Media’s second generation proprietary Adaptive DSP Error Recovery technology, its enhance write technology, and its error correction technologies extends the endurance of SLC and MLC NAND flash and maintains high performance throughout the drive’s life. Taken together these technologies can improve NAND endurance by 20 to 30 times base line performance.

"This infusion of capital allows us to continue to build product momentum and increase our presence in the fast evolving storage market, which is driven by the explosion in content and its delivery across a multitude of platforms, including enterprise systems, PCs, tablets, smartphones and set-top boxes," said Dr. Hemant Thapar, CEO and Chairman of Link_A_Media. "Our technology leadership for both magnetic and MLC Flash media uniquely positions us to address the emerging SoC needs of our HDD, SSD and Hybrid HDD OEM customers. As a provider of custom SoC solutions, we are seeing strong interest in our SoC technologies from enterprise and mobile customers requiring high performance or low power consumption, or both."