There may be a wave of shuffling in the control chip

The continuous crash of solid-state disk (SSD) has accelerated the rapid penetration of market penetration. The original Taiwanese NAND Flash control chip, which has been very hard to beat, has finally made significant gains. With the LSI storage division selling to hard disk manufacturers Seagate, Marvell, and the price of Marvell, the SSD market, which is more cost-conscious in the future, is expected to be more sloppy!

SSD prices shed a lot of NAND Flash control chip opportunities

SSD control chips used to be in the hands of LSI and Marvell. However, the former is sold to hard disk factories. It may become one of the internal departments of the hard disk factory and reduce the support for external customers. The Marvell solution is widely used. In order to be used by customers, but has always been known for its high cost, the SSD market has seen a drop in price since the beginning of this year, and customers are increasingly demanding lower costs. This is a good opportunity for Taiwanese NAND Flash control chip makers.

However, Taiwan's NAND Flash control chip maker’s biggest competitor may be an R&D team from a large NAND Flash company because Samsung Electronics, Toshiba, SanDisk, and SK Hynix are currently SK Hynix, etc., have their own SSD R&D department, which can more strictly control the quality of SSDs and the development progress.

Taiwan's NAND Flash control chip makers have indeed broken through the NAND Flash market and have had a good success! The Group’s recent acceptance of Toshiba’s SSD control chip is an example. It is expected that there will be more cooperation in 2015, and even hand in advanced process technology. Because SSDs are used in cloud storage in large quantities, the requirements for low power consumption are very strict. It is expected that 2015 The annual meeting has a 28-nanometer process SSD chip was born.

In addition, Lite-On is the SSD foundry of many notebook computer (NB) manufacturers. It has been working closely with Marvell and has the ability to write firmware on its own. However, since 2014, the price of SSDs has fallen to Lite-On. Pressure began to try to use the solution of Taiwanese NAND Flash controller chip suppliers. Hui Rong started to cooperate with Lite-On in October and was the first to break through the fence established by Marvell.

Taiwanese companies actively card the mainland market

Not only that, the SSDs are very costly in the mainland market, and they are also the place where NAND Flash control chip makers in Taiwan are stuck. The arms suppliers behind system brand suppliers are Taiwan factories, for example, the group support Jintaike, Zhiwei and Yingchi cooperation, first grab the market share of the mainland SSD market.

Some control chip makers believe that in the field of SSDs, they only supply finished products and do not sell chips to system manufacturers. Because SSDs actually have more problems, they do not want to spend too much resources to assist the technical support of the chips and sell them directly. The finished product is better to grasp the status of the product, and even if there are problems, it can be quickly resolved.

However, most companies agree that to have a place in the field of SSD control chips, to get more market share, to make money, and to invest in advanced processes to produce even lower-power chips, the only way is NAND Flash manufacturers have entered into their production supply chain, even suitable for the development of new chips, in order to have sufficient resources for long-term development, so the SSD market began to mature, but the reshuffle in the field of control chips may only come halfway. There will be more knockouts coming down.