GUC Produced ARM7-Based GP5080 SSD SoC Solution

Global Unichip Corporation (GUC), a service SoC design foundry and TSMC partner, announced the mass-production of its ARM7-based GP5080 series Solid Sate Disk (SSD) SoC platform solution, targeting the storage application for the booming market of netbook/smartbook, thin-NB, UMPC, MID and other portable consumer electronics.

Major requirements for this kind of applications are small form factor, low power consumption and durability. SSD is a good solution to provide the needed features. All these systems mentioned above are potential clients to access the ubiquitous web applications and this SSD solution is the first product of a series of upcoming Cloud Computing oriented solutions GUC intended to offer.

There are two different lineups in this series: GP5080 is optimized for cost sensitive applications by removing the need for external DRAM cache, while GP5086 supports DRAM cache for applications in need for extra extended lifetime. The complete GP5080 design kit includes SoC samples, evaluation board, reference design. With GP5080 series solution, SSD makers or system providers can provide quality products for customers with substantially reduced development cost and time-to-market.

GP5080 series solution is a highly integrated SSD SoC, based on advanced 90nm process technology. Its architecture has been optimized to fully utilize the maximum data transfer of NAND flash with minimum operating power. The 4 independent flash channels deliver excellent sequential and random Read/Write performance and support all major vendors’ SLC/MLC NAND flash devices. The SSD reliability is guaranteed by the on-chip hardware BCH-ECC engine which can correct up to 16 bit errors per 512 byte data. The featured 32-bit ARM7 processor will provide high computing capability for advanced SSD management firmware such as Flash Translation Layer, Bad Block Management, Wear Leveling Algorithm, Power Fail Recycling, SMART function, Disk Recovery/ROM Disk, etc. In addition, it supports PATA and SATA2 dual interface to provide extra flexibility and wide temperature range from -40oC to 85oC for industry-grade applications.

Global Unichip Corp exhibited GP5080 SoC platform and reference SSD solutions at Shenzhen CPSE 2009 Surveillance Show.