SST Offers the Industry’s Highest Performance Controller in the Smallest Package

August 3, 2004

SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.), a leader in flash memory technology, today announced a new family of ATA Flash Disk Controllers, providing customers with the industry’s highest-performance standalone controller. Utilizing SST’s embedded SuperFlash technology, the SST55LD019x controllers feature enhanced performance and functionality, including command support for ATA/ATAPI-5, added security protection and multi-word DMA. In addition to the industry standard 100-pin TQFP package, the SST55LD019x products are also offered in the industry’s smallest 9 mm x 9 mm, 84-ball TFBGA package, making the controllers an ideal solution for truly portable consumer applications.

SST’s ATA Flash Disk Controller manages the interface between the host system’s bus and the flash media, thus allowing designers to create their own flash memory-based mass data storage products such as ATA-Disk Chips (ADC), ATA-Disk Modules (ADM), CompactFlash cards and solid state drives. The controller family supports the standard ATA/IDE protocol up to PIO Mode-4 and has added a multi-word DMA Mode-2 interface for increased performance. The controller easily interfaces to standard NAND flash media with 512-byte or 2-Kbyte page sizes and in both x8 and x16 configuration.

By utilizing innovative multi-tasking technology, the SST55LD019x controller offers sustained read and write speeds of up to 10 MByte/sec., enabling fast data transfer to memory and leading to an enhanced end-user experience.

SST’s ATA Flash Disk Controller features three options: A, B and C. The SST55LD019A controller is ideal for applications requiring maximized random access performance, such as ATA Disk Modules. The SST55LD019B controller is targeted toward applications where the sequential access performance needs to be maximized, such as CompactFlash cards. The SST55LD019C is ideal when capacity and sequential access performance needs to be maximized, such as in high-capacity flash drive applications.

The ATA Flash Disk Controller is capable of directly interfacing up to eight external flash memory devices, at 8-Gbit density each, to create as large as an 8-GByte flash drive. Through simple decoding logic, the controller can also be designed to support up to 255 flash media devices for up to 32-GByte capacity.

“Our newest ATA Flash Disk Controller family offers the perfect balance of features, performance and package size for a variety of markets requiring greater performance and larger capacities,” said Samuel Nakhimovsky, product marketing manager, Application Specific Product Group, SST. “We believe our new SST55LD019 ATA Flash Disk Controller family is an ideal solution for customers developing solid state mass storage applications that require smaller, lighter designs with lower power consumption.”

Pricing and Availability
SST’s family of ATA Flash Disk Controllers is available now in a 100-pin TQFP package or an 84-ball TFBGA package. Pricing starts at $3.99 (U.S.) in 10K unit quantities. For more information about SST and its family of ATA Flash Disk Controllers, visit the company’s Web site at http://www.sst.com.

The original press release can be found here.