JMicron
JMicron plans to go up against Marvell and Phison in the race to the bottom. During Computex, we published a lengthy article covering what that means and how companies plan to push low-cost SSDs into notebooks that currently ship with mechanical disks. In short, the goal is to bring 256GB SSDs down to the $50 price point, allowing solid-state storage to displace 250GB hard drives in $400 laptops.
Several things need to happen first. The starting point is a controller that supports TLC flash and maintains more than 100 MB/s performance without a DRAM buffer. JMicron has two candidates: the JMF60E and JMF60F. They'll mainly hit emerging markets and OEM notebooks.
In the past, Western Digital worked with JMicron on SSHD products. Last year, it previewed a 3.5" SSHD that has yet to come to market. JMicron didn't explicitly say its JMF608 controller was inside, but the company did show off an upcoming SSHD at Computex 2015.
Prior to this year's show, we wrote a lengthy preview of the new JMicron JMF670H controller that features Write Booster technology. JMicron had the JMF670H on display in its own suite and branded products in Adata's booth. The 670H is an entry-level controller designed to increase mainstream SSD performance while enabling the use of low-cost flash.
The JMF680 is a slightly faster mainstream model that scales up to 2TB with advanced ECC and a SATA interface. The 680 controller will work with both MLC and TLC flash.
JMicron also talked about JMF815, a two-lane PCIe 3.0 AHCI controller that delivers up to 1200 MB/s sequential read and 1000 MB/s sequential write speeds. We don't expect to see either the JMF680 or JMF815 processors in retail products until 2016.
