Founded in 2006 - Anobit
is a NAND-based solutions provider. Its products range from MSP components to
complete, enterprise-class solid-state drives. Anobit works closely with some of
the world's largest NAND manufacturers, consumer electronics vendors and storage
solution providers. The company has raised raised over US$40 million in
investor funding. For more information visit www.anobit.com.
see
also:-
Anobit
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com
Who's who in SSD? - Zsolt Kerekes,
editor
Apple acquired
Anobit
in December 2011 for a sum thought to be in the range $400 to $500
million.
This means Anobit
has gone the same
way as other
SSD controller / IP
companies such as Pliant
and SandForce
As
I said in my 2011
summary - there's a growing realization that "SSD companies are
valuable."
Now that the deal is done - Apple customers will
probably be more interested in seeing what they can find in
Apple Insider's SSD page.
Another
final Anobit article
with an
Israel / SanDisk people connection - by SanDisk focused blogger - Savo
Lainen.
Anobit was a technology leader in
adaptive
flash care management & DSP IP for use inside SSDs. |
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editor's earlier comments:- April 2011
Anobit
entered the SSD controller market in June 2010. Its main competitors
are:-
SandForce (for
controllers) and STEC
(for SSDs). Because these are the companies which are setting the agenda in the
high IOPS part of the 2.5"
SSD market.
I wrote about the problems in reading repeatable
logic states from 3 bit MLC flash cells in my March 2008 article -
Unveiling XLC Flash SSD
Technology in which I said "In simple language - you don't always read
out the same digital value that you wrote in."
Anobit says it uses
DSP technology to
filter out effects which can mask or distort the true logic state (which is
inferred from reading an analog charge value back from the flash storage cell.)
While
it's almost certain that other SSD companies have alo been using their own
design tricks to get better results from this problematic interface - Anobit
was the first SSD company to publicly talk about this aspect of SSD design in a
systematic way. |
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In June 2010 -
Anobit entered the SSD
controller market with its
announcement it was sampling
SSDs based on its patented Memory Signal Processing technology which provide
20x improvement in operational life for MLC SSDs in high IOPS server
environments.
Based on proprietary algorithms that compensate for the
physical limitations of NAND flash, Anobit's MSP technology extends standard MLC
endurance from approximately 3K read/write cycles to over 50K cycles - to make
MLC technology suitable for high-duty cycle applications. This guarantees drive
write endurance
of 10 full disk writes per day, for 5 years, or 7,300 TBs for a 400GB
drive, with fully random data (worst-case conditions).
First-generation Anobit Genesis SSDs deliver 20,000
IOPS random
write and 30,000 IOPS random read, with 180MB/s sustained write and 220MB/s
sustained read.
In August 2010 -
Hynix Semiconductor
announced
it has selected Anobit's
SSD controller
technology to operate with its own 20nm class NAND Flash chips for use in a new
SSD design.
In December 2010 -
Anobit's chief scientist
Naftali Sommer wrote an article -
Signal Processing and
the evolution of NAND flash memory (pdf) - which was published in
Embedded Computing Design
magazine. The article describes the role of DSP in improving the integrity of
logic states read from flash cells.
In March 2011 -
Anobit announced
that it has commenced high volume production of its
MSP2020 NAND
flash memory controller in cooperation with
Hynix Semiconductor. The
MSP2020 controller enables the use of commercial-grade 2-bits-per-cell and
3-bits-per-cell NAND flash across all of the latest process nodes, within
endurance- and performance-intensive embedded computing applications. MSP2020
controllers support up to 2 ONFI-compliant NAND interfaces to a host processor,
and can support product configurations from 4GB to 128GB.
In April
2011 - Anobit
announced it has licensed IP cores from
Cosmic
Circuits for several of its SoCs. The analog IPs which consisted of
linear regulators, a
power-on-reset
and a silicon oscillator (with integrated clock multiplier) were implemented in
65nm CMOS process. These IPs were integrated into Anobit's
flash memory controllers
to enhance reliability
and performance.
In September 2011 -
Anobit
announced it is
sampling the fastest (yet) 2.5"
SATA SSDs based on its
own controller design. The new
Genesis
SSDs (upto 400GB) delivers up to 70,000/40,000
IOPS (4K
block size) and 510 MB/s sequential read/write with non-compressible data
using 2xnm MLC NAND. Anobit says its patented Memory Signal Processing
technology elevates
MLC endurance
from 3,000 write cycles to over 50,000.
In December 2011 -
industry
rumors discussed the possible acquisition of Anobit by
Apple for $400 to $500 million.
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| "A year ago there
were only 4 or 5 companies doing this - but I could see this technology trend
was creeping into double digits of companies and when that happens in the SSD
market you know that something significant is going on." |
| ...from:-
Adaptive
flash care management & DSP IP for use inside SSDs | | |
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| First you learned about SLC
(good flash). |
Then you learned about MLC (naughty
flash when it played in the enterprise - but good enough for the short
attention span of consumers).
Then MLC SSDs learned how to be good.
Now some MLC is much nicer than others. - When it's preceded by an "e"
(extra-good). But it costs more.
But other people say you don't need
the expensive "e" - because their controllers empathize better
with naughty flash. (They really care about naughty flash being sent to bad
block jail too soon.)
Is your head ready to explode yet?
It's going to get even more complicated.
......from
sugaring MLC for
the enterprise | | |
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