Samsung Invests $23 Million in Netlist

Netlist, Inc. has entered into a five year joint development and license agreement with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., to produce a class of NVDIMM-P (NV-P) memory solutions based on Samsung’s industry NAND Flash and DRAM, and Netlist’s work on HyperVault.

The companies will work to create a standardized product interface to facilitate market adoption and bring the compelling benefits of this technology to a large group of customers in cloud computing, big data, and server and storage markets.

Under the terms of the agreement, which includes licensing of each company’s respective patent portfolios, Netlist will receive $23 million, consisting of $8 million in cash from Samsung Electronics and $15 million in the form of investment from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The agreement calls for additional exchange of consideration as progress is made toward market introduction of the product. The companies plan to sample NV-P products with select customers in 2016.

NV-P is an emerging industry standard for a class of NAND-based storage which operates in the memory channel, the fastest data path in a computer. With HyperVault, Netlist created an unified memory-storage architecture where low cost, high density NAND storage can achieve the performance of high cost, high speed DRAM memory. This breakthrough patented architecture will be combined with Samsung’s industry DRAM and NAND, to produce NV-P solutions that deliver cost and performance benefits superior to those of traditional storage solutions.

“At Samsung, we are taking the lead in defining the right standards for storage class memory with industry partners, and creating new markets for DRAM and NAND flash memory based on the new standards. By using a standardized hybrid storage solution, our customers will be able to efficiently extract intelligence from large amounts of data in storage systems,” said Dr. Jung-Bae Lee, SVP of memory product planning and application engineering team, Samsung Electronics. “We are pleased to partner with Netlist, a company with a long-history of innovative memory technology solutions and IP, to productize and drive broad market adoption of this new standard.“

“This is a transformational partnership that validates our unique IP and provides an accelerated path for delivering NV-P to the mainstream market. Samsung is the unparalleled leader in memory and recognizes the value of disruptive technology in this sector,” said C.K. Hong, president and CEO, Netlist. “Samsung’s leadership in memory and Netlist’s expertise in hybrid storage are highly complementary, and together create a powerful platform for driving broad market adoption of this new storage class memory solution.“

“Computer architecture is going through important changes fueled by the advent of a new memory layer based on alternative memory types,” said Jim Handy, general director, Objective Analysis, an independent research firm. “This brings to computing a much faster kind of storage that can harness the raw speed of the memory bus through the NVDIMM-P memory module format. Objective Analysis projects that the market for such modules in servers could grow to $2 billion by 2019.“

NVDIMM-P is nomenclature adopted by the Storage Network Industry Association to describe storage class memory products that combine the functionalities of persistent DRAM and block accessed NAND Flash, and operate in the memory channel. HyperVault, a ‘superset’ of NVDIMM-P, further expands the capabilities of NAND so that they achieve near-DRAM performance and DDR4 compatibility with no system software modifications. NV-P solutions are expected to be initially targeted at the fastest tiers of storage where data throughput and latency are critical. These applications include big data analytics, virtualization, in-memory database, online transaction processing and database.