Silicon Motion Technology Corporation (SIMO) ("Silicon Motion"), a global leader in designing and marketing NAND flash controllers for solid state storage devices, today announced that it has begun sampling its SM2246EN ultra high-performance and low power consumption SATA Revision 3.1 (6Gb/s) SSD controller for client and NAND-cache SSD solutions. The SM2246EN's performance and power consumption specifications place it squarely among the top SATA SSD controllers on the market. It also supports MLC, TLC and SLC NAND flash from all the major NAND suppliers. Silicon Motion will be showcasing and demonstrating this product at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA from August 13 to 15.
  In addition, Silicon Motion will be discussing the long-term controller evolution necessary to manage sub-20nm NAND flash and incorporating innovative controller technologies such as LDPC ECC at two separate discussion forums on August 14, 2013 at the Flash Memory Summit.
  "We are excited to introduce SM2246EN, an innovative 4-channel SSD controller with tight cooperation between its hardware architecture and firmware management, delivering even higher performance than most 8-channel SSD controllers in the market," said Wallace Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion. "Our customers are impressed by SM2246EN's superior read/write rates as well as ultra-low power consumption, making it the ideal solution for high-performance, power efficient devices including PCs, Ultrabooks, tablets and industrial SSDs. Combined with our industry-leading, proprietary configurable ECC technology and comprehensive global customer support, the SM2246EN is a complete hardware and firmware controller solution that enables better endurance, higher reliability and more consistent performance throughout the lifecycle of the SSD."
  Silicon Motion's SM2246EN provides a complete hardware and firmware SSD controller solution with industry leading capabilities and technologies including:
  Ultra high sequential read performance of up to 540 MB/s and sequential write of up to 410 MB/s
  Delivers up to 80,000 random read IOPS and up to 75,000 random write IOPS
  Average power consumption of 60mW, 25% lower than the device power target of Intel's 2014 Ultrabook Guidelines with MobileMark 2012
  Advanced ECC management and wear leveling firmware to increase performance and extend reliability
  Ideally suited for both client SSDs and NAND-cache drives
  Proprietary, configurable ECC engine allows for consistent data throughput and performance throughout the entire SSD lifecycle
  Supports high toggle, ONFI and asynchronous NAND
  Supports the latest 1xnm / 1ynm MLC and TLC flash*, enabling better affordability and higher capacity SSDs
  Incorporates the latest security protocols and is AES 128/256, Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and Opal full-drive encryption compliant*
  Able to support both commercial and industrial grade requirements
  Silicon Motion is currently sampling its SM2246EN SSD controller and expects to enter mass production in the third quarter of 2013.
  "The SSD market is expected to grow at 35% CAGR to over 100 million units per year by 2017," said Michael Yang, Senior Principal Analyst for Memory & Storage at IHS. "Based on our testing, SMI's SM2246EN SSD controller exhibits very competitive performance against leading SSDs in the market. The availability of new merchant controllers such as SM2246EN as a viable alternative will help expand the overall SSD market."