Anobit battles 'plummeting' flash endurance

Peter Clarke

March 8, 2011

Peter Clarke

LONDON – Anobit Technologies Ltd. has said it has begun high volume production of its MSP2020 NAND flash memory controller in cooperation with Hynix Semiconductor Inc. It has also brought forward a supporter that says its IC can help address NAND flash memory that has been reduced to 3,000 read/write cycles in leading-edge devices.

Anobit was founded in 2006 to make solid-state drives. It's MSP (Memory Signal Processing) technology is a combination of error correction and memory management schemes that compensates for errors and evens out wear thereby allowing higher apparent performance.

The MSP2020 supports up to two ONFI-compliant NAND interfaces to a host processor, and can support product configurations from 4- to 128-Gbytes. As such the MSP2020 is suitable for high-performance mobile computing devices. It enables the use of commercial-grade two-bits-per-cell and three-bits-per-cell NAND flash within endurance- and performance-intensive embedded computing applications.

"In the span of just five years, the endurance of mainstream NAND flash has plummeted from 100,000 program/erase cycles to approximately 3,000 cycles, and the industry push toward three-bit-per-cell MLC NAND will place further downward pressure on NAND endurance. In parallel, mobile computing devices will continue to fuel demand for higher NAND endurance and performance," said Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst, Forward Insights, in a statement issued by Anobit (Herzeliya, Israel). "Anobit's innovative MSP technology is well positioned to close the NAND endurance gap, and in so doing, help fuel the proliferation of NAND flash memory into a variety of consumer electronics and computing markets."

"The MSP2020 flash controller has been qualified for production with Hynix 2xnm MLC NAND by one of our key customers," said J.S. Yang, Hynix vice president of engineering, in the same statement.


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