JMicron About To Unveil New Improved Flash Controller For SSDs

As many of you might know, previous SSDs which incorporated JMicron's JMF602 flash controller experienced stuttering problems during random write operations, and their follow-up chip, the JMF602B, only partially fixed the issues, forcing companies "to combine two JMF602B chips and an internal RAID chip from JMicron to boost performance."

It seems that JMicron learned from those mistakes though and is going to unveil "a new NAND flash controller for use in Solid State Drives (SSDs) in the near future. The JMF612 chip uses an ARM9 core in a 289-ball TFBGA package, and will support the use of up to 256MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM as an external cache.

The JMF612 chip is designed especially for a new generation of NAND flash chips built using smaller process geometries that will be entering the market soon. The new flash chips will be smaller, faster, and cheaper to manufacture. IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, is already building 34nm NAND, while 32nm NAND from Samsung and Toshiba will soon be entering production. The use of a cheap single-chip controller and new higher density flash chips could cut prices in half by the vital Christmas shopping season.

The first terabyte SSDs on the market could end up using this controller chip. It uses eight memory channels to access its storage quickly and without lag."