LSI First to Publicly Demonstrate SSDs with Toshiba 19nm and Intel 20nm NAND Flash Memories

TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- COMPUTEX 2012 -- LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today announced several demonstrations of its award-winning SandForce® SF-2000 Flash Storage Processors (FSPs) using Toshiba 19nm and Intel 20nm NAND flash memory, the most advanced flash memory technology currently available for solid state drive (SSD) applications. Interactive demonstrations can be seen at the Computex Taipei 2012 exposition taking place this week in Taipei, Taiwan.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120222/SF57952LOGO)

LSI SandForce FSPs are designed to provide best-in-class performance, reliability, endurance and power efficiency for NAND flash-based SSDs. With proven products available today, LSI offers SSD manufacturers a time-to-market advantage in building more affordable SSDs, helping to accelerate broad adoption of flash storage for cloud computing, enterprise and client applications. Shipments of SSDs in client and enterprise markets are expected to exceed 100 million units in 2015, representing a 56 percent growth rate over 2011 shipments.(1) 

"SSD users want to benefit from the significant cost advantages of the leading flash processes, but most SSD controllers can't support the complexities of the most advanced chips," said Jim Handy, SSD analyst for Objective Analysis. "By supporting today's smallest NAND processes, LSI provides OEMs and end users access to the most cost-effective deployment of flash memory in primary and I/O-intensive data storage workloads across cloud-computing, enterprise and client applications."

As flash memory geometries continue to shrink, the need to incorporate best-in-class error correction becomes more critical. This is due to increasing difficulty for individual cells to hold a specific charge, often resulting in reduced reliability, data integrity and data retention characteristics in flash devices. To optimize the reliability and endurance of 19nm and 20nm flash storage, LSI's SandForce SF-2000 FSPs offer industry-leading support of up to 55-bit errors per 512 byte sector, ideal for a processor designed to support both enterprise and client markets. LSI SandForce products include a unique error-correction engine  designed to address the ever-changing and increasing flash error-correction requirements of current and future state-of-the-art NAND flash technologies.

"Working with all six leading manufacturers of NAND flash technology enables LSI to optimize our flash processors for ever-shrinking silicon geometries," said Michael Raam, vice president and general manager, Flash Components Division, LSI. "SSDs are proving their ability to deliver exceptional levels of reliability, longevity and power efficiency in mission-critical computing environments in the cloud and Fortune 1000 enterprises, and as users become more comfortable with these attributes, we're seeing widespread adoption of SSDs that we expect to continue." 

To meet customers' reliability and endurance requirements for flash devices using smaller silicon geometries, LSI SandForce FSPs feature DuraClass® advanced NAND flash management technology.

DuraClass management features include:

• DuraWrite™: optimizes the number of flash program cycles to effectively extend flash-rated endurance.
• RAISE™ (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements): delivers orders-of-magnitude improvement in drive reliability, resulting in RAID-like protection and recovery from a single-drive solution.
• Advanced Wear Leveling and Monitoring: optimized wear-leveling algorithms, further extending flash endurance.
• Recycler: intelligently performs "garbage collection" to erase invalid data while minimizing the impact on flash endurance.

LSI technology demonstrations will be available in LSI suites 1037 and 1038 at the Grand Hyatt Taipei. For more informance on LSI SandForce FSPs, visit: www.lsi.com/sandforce.

About LSI
LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in data centers, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com.

(1) IDC, "IDC WW SSD 2011-2015 Forecast Update", March 2012.

LSI, the LSI & Design logo, SandForce, DuraClass, DuraWrite and RAISE are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation.
All other brand or product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE LSI Corporation