Phison has announced that its SSD controllers now support 3D NAND flash chips manufactured by Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd (YMTC), as per DigiTimes today. This latest development unlocks the door for SSDs with Chinese-made NAND to penetrate the storage market.
YMTC has been recruiting strategic partners to build its own ecosystem. Before the latest announcement, the Chinese manufacturer had already partnered with Adata and Silicon Motion. The addition of Phison is a key one, since Phison (like Silicon Motion) specializes in SSD controllers, which is a crucial component in SSDs.
YMTC was previously playing catch up to the other top NAND players on the market. However, the company's strong determination eventually led to the NAND maker transitioning from 64 layers to 128 layers, while entirely skipping the 96-layer phase.
According to DigiTimes, Phison's complete portfolio has been validated to support YMTC's 64-layer and looming 128-layer 3D NAND chips, with the latter based around YMTC's Xtacking 2.0 technology.
Consumer storage is just a stepping stone though. Phison expects its partnership with YMTC to eventually extend to high-end storage, such as industrial embedded and enterprise products.
Having Adata on YMTC's side should certainly prove beneficial for the chipmaker. Adata, like countless other SSD vendors, doesn't make its own NAND chips and depend on third-parties, like Micron, Kioxia, Intel and etc
YMTC's offerings look competitive on paper, and with the right pricing and incentives, we can expect other SSD manufacturers to eventually board the YMTC train.
