SK Hynix’s acquisition of Intel’s NAND flash division is complete in part one: most of the SSD development workforce and associated patents have changed companies. Under new management, the division will remain largely independent – it now operates under the name Solidigm and is headquartered in San José, California.
Robert B. Crooke leads Solidigm as CEO, having previously served at Intel as senior vice president of the non-volatile memory solutions group. Solidigm employs more than 2000 people at 20 locations worldwide. The first phase of the acquisition cost SK Hynix $7 billion. In 2025, the companies aim to complete the second phase for US$2 billion, after which the remaining research staff will transfer to SK Hynix (or Solidigm respectively) and the new owner will take over operations at the memory semiconductor plant in Dalian, China.
Parallel product lines
In an interview with blocks and files said the two company strategists Greg Matson and Avi Shetty a little bit out of the box. The SK Hynix and Solidigm product lines will continue to run in parallel. Both departments use different NAND flash technology: until recently, Intel stuck to so-called floating gate technology, in which the charges for the memory state are stored in electrically isolated polysilicon gates. Solidigm continues the development – currently based on NAND flash with 144 memory layers and up to four bits per cell (Quadruple Level Cells, QLC).
Like many other manufacturers, including market leader Samsung, SK Hynix has long since switched to charge-trap technology, in which silicon nitride films trap the electrons. In the future, SK Hynix and Solidigm want to use SSDs with charge-trap memory components, particularly in servers and data centers – SK Hynix uses the contacts from Solidigm for this.
First cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD with Intel genes
Solidigm intends to use the floating gate memory chips in particular for inexpensive retail SSDs. The first dedicated SSD with PCI Express 4.0 connection intended for end customers is to appear this year, according to the wording as a potential successor to the SSD 670p series. Also in the future you want to serve the entry-level class with low prices. For this purpose, DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 SSDs are developed, which use the RAM modules of the PC as a buffer. Samsung offers a similar model with the SSD 980.
SSD modules that store 5 bits per cell (Penta Level Cells, PLC) will follow in the future, but only for special series and less for the general public.
(mma)