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SSD controllers for TLC and 3-D NAND flash

Date: 06/06/2015
Due to triple level cell (TLC) NAND flash offering higher capacity and lowest cost per MB of NAND flash, TLC is gaining popularity in the market of NAND flash storage. There are two vendors supplying SSD controllers for TLC NAND flash and also 3-D NAND flash:

1. Silicon Motion's SM2256, is a SATA 6Gb/s SSD controller solution supporting 1x/1y/1z nm triple-level cell (TLC) NAND from all major NAND suppliers. Silicon Motion' SM2256 also supports exclusively for Micron made 16nm 128 gigabit (Gb) TLC NAND flash memory chips.

SM2256 is designed to support speeds of 540MB/s sequential read performance and 460MB/s sequential write, as well as up to 90,000 random read IOPS and 80,000 random write IOPS. SM2256 uses a technology called NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC) technology to enhance the endurance and retention of TLC NAND, delivering more than three times better reliability for TLC SSD as compared to the existing BCH ECC schemes, says Silicon Motion.

LDPC soft-decoding digital signal processing algorithm for error correction by voltage threshold tracking and on-chip RAID with page parity features are used for recovery of uncorrectable data in Silicon Motions' SSD controller chips.

2. To give you another SSD controller chip which was launched in the year 2014, Marvell had made available DRAM-less NVMe SSD Controller for mass market mobile computing based on its own technology called NANDEdge LDPC error correction technology Supporting TLC and 3D NAND.

Key features of Marvell’s new 88NV1140 and 88NV1120 include:
88NV1140: AHCI and NVMe support over PCIe Gen3x1
Fully hardware automated NVMe 1.1b support
Low power management (L1.2) design
88NV1120: SATA 6Gb/s support
SATA DevSlp support
88NV1140 and 88NV1120 both share:
Powerful Dual core Cortex R5 CPU’s
Embedded SRAM with hardware accelerators to optimize IOPS performance
ONFI3 and Toggle2 NAND support
NANDEdge error-correction: 15nm TLC and 3D NAND support using LDPC technology to boost endurance and reliability
BGA SSD and M.2/2.5 slim form factor support with thermal optimization and small package size
28nm low power CMOS process