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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
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editor's comments:-
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."
earlier editor's 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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Will the
enterprise SSD market be big enough for all these companies [list] to grow?
I'm often asked that question - although everyone who asks it
populates the [list] with their own set of SSD companies. |
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| SSD uncertainty -
what's the best eMLC? |
Editor:- July 25, 2011 - STEC is lifting the
veil off how it manages MLC flash inside its enterprise and industrial SSDs -
as part of a new positioning gambit that warns customers - not all so called
enterprise MLC SSDs are created equal.
You're thinking -
isn't it all MLC management in enterprise SSDs pretty much the same? - Just a
variation on what
SandForce and
Fusion-io already do?
(Only STEC is more expensive than SF, and not as fast as FIO...)
That's
what I thought too - but I was wrong.
This will be the start of new
enterprise MLC branding
wars in which SSD designers and memory makers battle it out to try and
convince you... |
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... that their own (very
different) ways of doing enterprise MLC SSDs - as they head towards 1X
nanometer flash - is better than all the others.
...read the article | | | |
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| don't all PCIe SSDs
look pretty much the same? |
When you look at the
photos and headline specs for high speed PCIe SSDs - it's easy to come away with
the impression that they all look the same and have about the same performance.
After
all - how different can they be?
But don't let the experience of the
2.5" SSD market -
in which clusters of consumer SSD vendors use the
same or similar
controllers and hover
close together inpopular
(consumer) performance rankings - give you the wrong idea about
PCIe SSDs.
In
this market the performance limits and capabilities of the SSD aren't set by an
old hard disk interface
and package limitations.
In the PCIe market the products you get are
limited only by the imagination of the designers - tempered by the guesses of
marketers who are trying to predict the optimum (most salable) features for an
ideal SSD. |
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| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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| the Problem with
Write IOPS in flash SSDs |
Random "write IOPS"
in many of the fastest
flash SSDs are now similar to "read IOPS" - implying a
performance symmetry which was once believed to be impossible.
So why
are flash SSD IOPS such a poor predictor of application performance? And why
are users still buying
RAM SSDs which cost an
order of magnitude more than SLC? (let alone
MLC) - even
when the IOPS specs look superficially similar?
This article
tells you why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. |
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And why competing SSDs with
apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely differently.
...read the
article | | | |
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