Sunnyvale, Calif. — Greenliant Systems, a manufacturer of energy-efficient solid-state storage products, has purchased the NANDrive, NAND Controller and Specialty Flash Memory assets of Microchip Technology Inc. The three product lines will form the core of Greenliant’s solid-state storage product portfolio for the embedded system, data center and mobile Internet markets, said Greenliant.
Greenliant was founded in April 2010 by former SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.) chairman and CEO Bing Yeh. “By acquiring the NANDrive solid-state drive and NAND Controller assets of Microchip Technology, Greenliant is well positioned to take a leadership position in the fast-growing market for solid-state storage products,” Yeh said in a statement.
Greenliant’s core management and engineering staff include many of the original NANDrive and NAND Controller design team members.
The company’s flagship product, the NANDrive solid-state drive (SSD), consists of an integrated ATA controller and NAND flash die in a tiny multi-chip package measuring as small as 12 x 24 mm. NANDrive includes built-in microcontroller and file management firmware that communicates with ATA-standard interfaces, eliminating the need for additional or proprietary host software such as Flash File System (FFS) or Memory Technology Driver (MTD) software, according to the company.
NANDrive products are available in capacities ranging from 512 MByte to 8 GByte and support industrial temperature ranges. Higher capacity NANDrive products will be announced soon. They can be used in communications, industrial, medical and networking applications.
Greenliant’s Specialty Flash Memory product offering includes the ComboMemory family, consisting of 1.8V and 3.0V standard and address/data bus multiplex flash plus PSRAM combination memory products. These devices are housed in packages as small as 6 x 8 x 1mm, making them suitable for space- and power-constrained portable devices.
The MTP (Many-Time Programmable) family combines the erase capability of flash with the cost effectiveness of EPROM/OTP (one-time programmable) memory. The SSF (Small-Sector Flash) products are suitable for applications requiring fine data granularity, and the multi-bank architecture and read-while-write operations of Greenliant’s CSF (Concurrent SuperFlash) series make it well suited for wireless applications.