Silicon Motion offers 'single-chip' SSD

LONDON – Fabless chip company Silicon Motion Technology Corp. has announced its FerriSSD chip, which it describes as the world's smallest "single-chip" solid-state drive.

The chip provides 32-Gbyte or 64-GByte of storage but it seems likely it is multiple die in a single component. It offers SATA or PATA interfaces and comes in a BGA package with both commercial-grade (0 to 70 degrees C) and industrial-grade (-40 to 85 degrees C) temperature support.

The FerriSSD is suitable for embedded storage in industrial PCs, tablets, navigation devices, point-of-sale terminals, medical devices, test instruments, and other specialty devices, Silicon Motion (Jhubei City, Taiwan) said.

The single BGA package measures 16-mm by 20-mm and offers 32-Gbytes using single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory and 64-Gbytes using multi-level cell (MLC) memory, SMT said. The FerriSSD includes Silicon Motion's NAND flash memory controller, error-correction code engine and wear leveling.

Silicon Motion was founded in 1995 in San Jose, California, and is traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange.