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

LSI SandForce SF-2000 Flash Storage Processors help maximise reliability and accelerate performance of industry’s most advanced flash media

COMPUTEX 2012, TAIPEI, TAIWAN, June 7, 2012 – LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) has 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.

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 optimise 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 optimise 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™: optimises the number of flash programme 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: optimised wear-leveling algorithms, further extending flash endurance.

•     Recycler: intelligently performs “garbage collection” to erase invalid data while minimising the impact on flash endurance.

For more informance on LSI SandForce FSPs, visit: www.lsi.com/sandforce.

1. IDC, “IDC WW SSD 2011-2015 Forecast Update”, March 2012.

Press Contact: Nicki Langley -  Neesham Public Relations, Tel: 44 (0) 1622 210080, Email: nickil@neesham.co.uk

About LSI

LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters and mobile networks. 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.

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