The cost of solid state drives could be cut in half thanks to new NAND flash controllers from JMicron.
Combined with smaller, cheaper and faster NAND flash chips that will soon enter the market, DailyTech reports that JMicron's contribution may drastically reduce prices by the holiday shopping season. The new generation of flash chips are being built by IM Flash Technologies, Samsung and Toshiba. Eventually, the new controller could be found in the market's first terabyte SSDs.
Built-in flash controllers like JMicron's upcoming JMF612 chip manage the spare room on flash drives that are used to handle bad blocks and other issues. This area could be handled by a computer's processor instead of a controller, but at the expense of computing power.
Besides a competitive price, the JMF612 brings some other perks, such as eight memory channels for accessing storage, Native Command Queueing support to optimize read and write orders and full-disc protection with 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard protocols. The chip is designed for a SATA II interface, but includes a USB 2.0 interface for transfers and firmware upgrades.
Engineering samples will be shown at Computex 2009 next month, and mass production is expected to begin in July. Since price always comes up as the biggest roadblock to explosive SSD growth, any news along this line is welcome. Here's to a holiday season full of laptops with solid state drives.
