Marvell unveils 6 Gb/s SATA controller

A solid-state drive (SSD) controller aimed at the consumer, mobile, and enterprise markets features a 6 Gb/s host interface compliant with SATA Revision 3.1. Powered by embedded processor technology, the 88SS9187 from Marvell supports up to eight NAND flash channels with interfaces up to 200 MB/s per channel. The device sports on-chip RAID technology with a customer-firmware-based algorithm to optimize retiring of defective NAND blocks, planes, dice, or devices. It also offers a high-speed DDR3 DRAM interface with support for up to 1 GB of memory, allowing customers to implement mapping algorithms.

The third-generation controller boasts the maximum sequential read performance for a SATA 6 Gb device and ~500 MB/s of sequential write performance. It supports four CEs per channel. Encoded mode allows up to 16x CEs per channel using external decoders.

Other features include:

• A high-performance ECC engine with adaptive read and write scheme to enables correction capability
• Support for auxiliary data insertion, extraction, and comparison
• Metadata support with independent ECC support
• Hardware support to ease mixing between two different NAND devices
• Programmable drive strengths of I/Os for different NAND flash devices and different configurations
• Programmable timing parameters to support difference NAND flash devices

For more information, visit Marvell.

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