JMicron is one of the companies that made it possible for the Solid State Drive market to grow as fast as it has. Despite that the chip maker has been one of the most criticized because of its NAND flash memory controller. The JMicron JMF602 controller was found in almost all retail drives at the start and did boost some nice transfer rates but it suffered from other major problems, especially so called stuttering. The company hopes to redeem itself with a new memory controller.
JMicron JMF612 will be shown at Computex 2009 next week and inside the flash memory controller we find an ARM9 core and support for up to 256MB cache of DDR or DDR2 DRAM. The controller uses the SATA II interface, but it is working on a SATA 6Gbps version set to launch next year.
JMicron’s well known JMF602 chip rev. B was slightly better than the infamous rev. A
With plenty of cache and new components JMF612 will have solved the problems with stuttering and could JMicron keep the same low price as with previous models we could have a real nice development ahead of us.
Especially since JFM612 is designed to be used with 32nm NAND flash chips that will offer higher storage density and and lower manufacturing costs than today’s 50nm circuits.
In July JMicron will start mass producing the new flash memory controller and shortly afterward we will see the first SSDs with the controller.
