This is a list of manufacturers of flash memory controllers for various flash memory devices like SSDs, USB flash drives, SD cards, and CompactFlash cards.
Name | Based in | Status | Manufactures NVMe Controllers | Manufactures SATA Controllers | Manufactures CF & SD Controllers |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Fusion-io [1] Acquired by SanDisk then Western Digital | United States | Captive | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Greenliant Systems [2] | United States | Independent | No | Yes | Yes |
Hyperstone [3] | Germany | Independent | No | Yes | Yes |
Indilinx [4] Acquired by Toshiba then Kioxia | South Korea | Captive | Yes | Yes | No |
Intel [5] | United States | Captive | Yes | Yes | No |
IntelliProp [6] | United States | Independent | Yes | Yes | No |
InnoGrit [7] | China | Independent | Yes | Yes | Yes |
JMicron, spun off into Maxiotek [8] [9] | Taiwan | Independent | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Marvell [10] | United States | Independent | Yes | Yes | No |
Maxio [11] | China | Independent | Yes | Yes | No |
Micron | United States | Independent | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Novachips [12] | South Korea | Independent | Yes | Yes | No |
Phison [13] | Taiwan | Independent | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Realtek [14] [15] [16] | Taiwan | Independent | Yes | Yes | — |
Samsung [17] | South Korea | Captive | Yes | Yes | Yes |
SK Hynix | South Korea | Captive | Yes | Yes | No |
SandForce [18] Acquired by Seagate Technology | United States | Captive | Yes | Yes | No |
Silicon Motion [19] | Taiwan | Independent | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Starblaze [20] | China | Independent | Yes | No | No |
sTec [21] Acquired by HGST then Western Digital | United States | Captive | Yes | Yes | No |
Kioxia [22] Spun off from Toshiba | Japan | Captive | Yes | Yes | Yes |
VIA Technologies [23] | Taiwan | Captive | Yes | Yes | No |
FADU [24] | South Korea | Captive | Yes | No | No |
Kraftway [25] | Russia | Independent | Yes | No | No |
DSOL | Russia | Independent | No | Yes | No |
Note: Independent=sells to any 3rd party; Captive=only used for their own products
The following were the largest NAND flash memory manufacturers, as of the second quarter of 2023. [26]
Samsung remains the largest NAND flash memory manufacturer as of second quarter 2023. [29]
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use the same cell design, consisting of floating gate MOSFETs. They differ at the circuit level depending on whether the state of the bit line or word lines is pulled high or low: in NAND flash, the relationship between the bit line and the word lines resembles a NAND gate; in NOR flash, it resembles a NOR gate.
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including data storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
Input/output operations per second is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). Like benchmarks, IOPS numbers published by storage device manufacturers do not directly relate to real-world application performance.
A hybrid drive is a logical or physical computer storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.
SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. SK Hynix is one of the world's largest semiconductor vendors.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, and solid-state disk.
The Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group is a consortium of technology companies working to develop open standards for NAND flash memory and devices that communicate with them. The formation of ONFI was announced at the Intel Developer Forum in March 2006.
Phison Electronics Corporation is a Taiwanese public electronics company that primarily designs, manufactures and sells controllers for NAND flash memory chips. These are integrated into flash-based products such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and solid-state drives (SSDs).
In electronics, a multi-level cell (MLC) is a memory cell capable of storing more than a single bit of information, compared to a single-level cell (SLC), which can store only one bit per memory cell. A memory cell typically consists of a single floating-gate MOSFET, thus multi-level cells reduce the number of MOSFETs required to store the same amount of data as single-level cells.
Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a flash storage specification for digital cameras, mobile phones and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to bring higher data transfer speed and increased reliability to flash memory storage, while reducing market confusion and removing the need for different adapters for different types of cards. The standard encompasses both packages permanently embedded within a device (eUFS), and removable UFS memory cards.
The Opal Storage Specification is a set of specifications for features of data storage devices that enhance their security. For example, it defines a way of encrypting the stored data so that an unauthorized person who gains possession of the device cannot see the data. That is, it is a specification for self-encrypting drives (SED).
Netlist, Inc. is a Delaware-registered corporation headquartered in Irvine, California that designs and sells high-performance SSDs and modular memory subsystems to enterprise customers in diverse industries. It also manufactures a line of specialty and legacy memory products to storage customers, appliance customers, system builders and cloud and datacenter customers. Netlist holds a portfolio of patents in the areas of server memory, hybrid memory, storage class memory, rank multiplication and load reduction. Netlist has more than 120 employees and an annual revenue of US$142.4 million as of 2021 The stock was added to NASDAQ in late 2006. In the initial public offering of its common stock in 2006, Netlist sold 6,250,000 shares at $7.00 each. On September 26, 2018, Netlist announced they were moving from NASDAQ and currently trades on the OTCQB.
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The initial NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators, network devices, high-performance datacenter AI ASICs, as on-package cache in CPUs and on-package RAM in upcoming CPUs, and FPGAs and in some supercomputers. The first HBM memory chip was produced by SK Hynix in 2013, and the first devices to use HBM were the AMD Fiji GPUs in 2015.
3D XPoint is a discontinued non-volatile memory (NVM) technology developed jointly by Intel and Micron Technology. It was announced in July 2015 and was available on the open market under the brand name Optane (Intel) from April 2017 to July 2022. Bit storage is based on a change of bulk resistance, in conjunction with a stackable cross-grid data access array, using a phenomenon known as Ovonic Threshold Switch (OTS). Initial prices are less than dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) but more than flash memory.
Kioxia Holdings Corporation, simply known as Kioxia and stylized as KIOXIA, is a Japanese multinational computer memory manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. The company was spun off from the Toshiba conglomerate as Toshiba Memory Corporation in June 2018. It became a wholly owned subsidiary company of Toshiba Memory Holdings Corporation on March 1, 2019, and was renamed Kioxia in October 2019. In the early 1980s, while still part of Toshiba, the company was credited with inventing flash memory. In the second quarter of 2021, the company was estimated to have 18.3% of the global revenue share for NAND flash solid-state drives. The company is the parent company of Kioxia Corporation.