Monday, June 1st 2009
New JMicron JMF612 Controller Could Halve SSD Prices
Apparently JMicron is on its way to perfect solid-state technology, as the company is working on a new NAND flash controller for use in solid-state drives that may halve their prices. Named JMF612, this chip will use an ARM9 core in a 289-ball TFBGA package with 32 KB of ROM and 128 KB of RAM at its core, and will support the use of up to 256 MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM as an external cache. It will work specifically with new 34 nm and 32 nm NAND chips, have Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and will aslo support 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) disk encryption. Supported interfaces by the new controller will include SATA 3.0 Gbps and USB 2.0 for data transfers or firmware updates. JMicron will be showing engineering samples of the controller at Computex 2009. Mass production of the new chip is expected to start in July. Once in production, the cheap and fast JMF612 could contribute to a massive 50% drop in prices of solid-state drives, but this could happen as late as the end of the year sources indicate.
Source:
DailyTech
15 Comments on New JMicron JMF612 Controller Could Halve SSD Prices
Of course I just bought an SSD too. face-palm.
More performance at lower prices is always welcome though :)
The cost of the SSD is all in the NAND flash chips, not the controller.
Even on a 16GB MLC SSD without dram cache chip (cheapest SSD), the controller only accounts for about 10% of the build cost of the SSD.
Step up to a 256GB MLC SSD with dram cache chip (most expensive SSD), the controller now only accounts for less than 3% of the build cost of the SSD.
Halve the cost of the controller, and you're only dropping the SSD cost by a couple percent, at most.
Oh, did I mention I'm the lead engineer on SSD products at my company? :)
You also havent provided anything that would make me beleive you... no offense, this is the internet. I'm the queen of france, btw.
what % does the controller add to the cost, in your opinion, for MLC and SLC?
The cheapest MLC 128Gb/16GB chips are ~$25 each. 16 in a 256GB SSD,
16 x $25 = $400 for 256GB of MLC NAND.
$5 for PCB and components.
$6 - $12 controller, depending on brand (not including Intel and Samsung controllers)
$5 for DRAM.
The article clearly states that the SSD cost will be halved, but not from decreased controller cost.
The cost is actually halved from the die shrink to 3x nm node.