SSDs Now Using 19nm Flash Chips Thanks to LSI
The LSI Corporation, a leading designer of semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in data centers, mobile networks and client computing, today announced several public demonstrations of its award-winning SandForce SF-2000 Flash Storage Processors (FSPs) using Toshiba 19nm and Intel 20nm NAND flash memory, the most advanced NAND Flash memory technology currently available for solid-state drive (SSD) applications. Interactive demonstrations can be viewed at the Computex Taipei 2012 exposition taking place this week in Taipei, Taiwan.
LSI SandForce FSPs were designed to give the best-in-class performance, reliability, endurance and power efficiency for NAND Flash-based SSDs. With established products already available today, LSI has proven to offer SSD manufacturers a time-to-market advantage in building more affordable SSDs, helping to accelerate broad adoption of flash storage for cloud computing, enterprise and client applications. Shipments of SSDs in client and enterprise markets are expected to exceed 100 million units in 2015, representing a 56% growth rate over 2011 shipments.
"SSD users want to benefit from the significant cost advantages of the leading flash processes, but most SSD controllers can't support the complexities of the most advanced chips," says Jim Handy, SSD analyst for Objective Analysis. "By supporting today's smallest NAND processes, LSI provides OEMs and end users access to the most cost-effective deployment of flash memory in primary and I/O-intensive data storage workloads across cloud-computing, enterprise and client applications."
As NAND Flash memory geometries continue to shrink, the need to incorporate best-in-class error correction becomes even more critical. This is because of increasing difficulty for individual cells to hold a specific charge, often resulting in reduced reliability, data integrity and data retention characteristics in NAND Flash memory devices. To optimize the reliability and endurance of 19nm and 20nm flash storage, LSI's SandForce SF-2000 FSP offers industry-leading support of up to 55-bit errors per 512 byte sector, great for a processor designed to support both enterprise and client markets. LSI SandForce products include a unique error-correction engine made to address the ever-changing and increasing NAND Flash error-correction requirements of current and future NAND Flash technologies.
"Working with all six leading manufacturers of NAND flash technology enables LSI to optimize our flash processors for ever-shrinking silicon geometries," says Michael Raam, Vice President and General Manager, Flash Components Division, LSI. "SSDs are proving their ability to deliver exceptional levels of reliability, longevity and power efficiency in mission-critical computing environments in the cloud and Fortune 1000 enterprises, and as users become more comfortable with these attributes, we're seeing widespread adoption of SSDs that we expect to continue."