Micron Technology, a well known manufacturer of both DRAM and NAND flash memory, and the company behind Crucial and Lexar, has acquired a small company called Tidal System, a company that produces SSD controllers.

With the acquisition of Tidal Systems, Micron Technology does not have to rely on SSD controllers from other companies which suggest that we might soon see a Crucial SSD based solely on Micron NAND and its own Tidal Systems SSD controller.

The Tidal Systems was founded back in 2014 by Mike Lee and Cody Wu, a two well known SSD experts that were behind the development iof SSD controllers at Link-a-Media (LAMD) and Sandforce/LSI. The company was quickly built up with engineers from Sandforce, LSI and Skyera and it already has two advanced NAND flash controllers, PCIe/NVMe and SATA 6Gbps one.

Tidal Systems also made significant progress in Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) technology, which is considered one the most promising technologies in correct retention errors that plague modern NAND flash memory, especially current TLC and upcoming QLC NAND flash. Currently, only a few NAND controllers coming from Marvell, Intel and PCM-Sierra actually support LDPC and it appears that Tidal Systems also has one.

Although Micron now has Tidal Systems, which is definitely a great addition to the company, Samsung is still ahead with its 3D NAND stacked flash memory. Micron, and other NAND manufacturers simply have to keep up with the development of NAND chips as well as SSD controllers.



Source: Kitguru.net.