JMicron might just become the most beloved storage controller company on the planet if Daily Tech is right.  This may seem a little odd as the rushed out JMF602 and JMF602B have been destroying the random write performance of cheaper SSDs.  Some companies figured out a fix, SSDs like OCZ’s Apex and G.Skill’s Titan depend on two controllers and a RAID chip to deal with the performance problems without raising prices into the land of the Intel X25-M.  The next generation of SSD will use a new type of NAND and may well use the new JMF612 controller.  This new generation uses an ARM9 with 32KB of ROM and 128KB of RAM at its core, and it will support up to 256MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM for an external cache.  The JMF612 will support NCQ, AES, ECC and a whole alphabet of features that will be the standard with SATA-II. 

Along with the features comes the most important part of this announcement, the performance gap between SSDs using JMicron controllers and those using Samsung or Indilinx should narrow.  If that does indeed happen, those higher end controllers are going to have to reduce prices to compete and that will mean cheaper SSDs for everyone.


“DailyTech has learned that JMicron will be unveiling a new NAND flash controller for use in Solid State Drives (SSDs) in the near future. The JMF612 chip uses an ARM9 core in a 289-ball TFBGA package, and will support the use of up to 256MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM as an external cache.

The new chip was designed to remedy stuttering problems during random write operations, which has plagued SSDs using the JMF602 flash controller. JMicron rushed out a JMF602B chip to address shortcomings, but was only partially successful. Several firms decided to combine two JMF602B chips and an internal RAID chip from JMicron to boost performance. Although it raised costs significantly, it was still cheaper than controllers from Samsung and Indilinx, which were not yet available at the time. It was for this reason that SSDs like OCZ’s Apex and G.Skill’s Titan series were born.”

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