Start-Up TenaFe Out of Stealth Mode
Revealing TC2200 12nm PCIe 4.0 DRAMless SSD controller with 4 NAND channels supporting up to 1,600MT/s per channel
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 31, 2021 at 2:32 pmStart-up TenaFe Inc. announced the launch of its TC2200, a 12nm PCIe 4.0 DRAMless SSD controller, featuring 4 NAND channels supporting up to 1600MT/s per channel.
The company‘s founding team has an average of 15+ years of storage experience. The team’s heritage in OEM and enterprise storage inspired the creation of a failure analysis and prediction technology that will change the SSD qualification process, enabling customers to shorten qualification times and their platforms’ overall time to market.
Its transformative patented technology is targeted at OEM customers for client, data centers, and edge computing- offering high performance and reliable SSD controller solutions while maintaining the best power and thermal efficiencies.
With this announcement, the company is bringing to market an optimized DRAMless architecture, which will be positioned to tackle key challenges for next-gen industry applications in the 5G and IoT era. As SSDs scale to multi-terabyte capacities, conventional SSD architecture that are dependent upon DRAM present challenges with respect to bill of material costs, power consumption, thermals, and the increasing need to provide small form factor SSDs such as M.2 2230 and BGA.
The technology breaks through these barriers with its TC2200 DRAMless controller solution by offering performance capabilities of up to 4.8GB/s at less than 4.0W active power with leverage of Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature. This performance, combined with power and thermal efficiencies, makes it for devices such as ultra-portable laptops, gaming consoles, and edge computing platforms.
In addition, the TC2200 controller features FlexLDPC technology, a proprietary LDPC error correction engine which provides for latency, QoS, and endurance for the latest TLC and QLC NAND flash technologies.
“I am proud of our team’s execution and am excited to solve customers’ challenges with this market changing solution. We will use this as a baseline to set an even higher bar for our next-gen data center-focused controller, enabling our customers much faster time to market” said Mike Lee, co-founder and CEO. “We are grateful for the support of our partners, customers, and investors, all of whom enabled us to accomplish this important milestone.“
“PCIe Gen4 DRAMless SSD provides the best cost-performance efficiency and will become the prevailing client storage solution moving forward. TenaFe’s TC2200 SSD Controller, with its impressive power and thermal profile, is well positioned to capture the growth in this market,” said Greg Wong, president, Forward Insights.
The company will begin sampling to customers in April 2021 in both SDK and FTK formats.
About TenaFe
The company was founded in 2019 by the founder of Tidal Systems and a team of storage industry veterans. It has taken multiple storage start-ups to market. The storage solutions developed by the founding team have been deployed in many products across OEM, data center, and enterprise markets. It has offices in Campbell, CA, Beijing and Shanghai (China), and Hsinchu,Taiwan.
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In 2020, the start-up raises $29 million in series A funding led by a consortium of investors including Eight Roads Ventures and Northern Light Venture Capital.
CEO and co-founder Mike Lee, based in Cupertino, CA, was GM of Micron from 2015 to 2018, and formerly, from 2013 to 2015, CEO, CTO and co-founder of Tidal Systems acquired by Micron. Before that, he was director, SSD development at Link-A-Media, acquired by SK hynix for around 9 years after being design engineer for 4 years at Integrated Device Technology.
Other founder is Priyanka Thakore with the position of chief architect, also coming from Micron, Tidal Systems and SK hynix.
Here is how is positioned PCIe Gen4 TenaFe TC2200 SSD controller:
Key features:
The young company is also working on PCIe Gen5 for enterprise SSDs.
Broadcom (acquiring SandForce and LSI then Avago), Fadu, Marvell, Maxio, Phison, RealTek, and Silicon Motion are among the competitors in this market of SSD controllers. But some SSD makers, generally the big ones, like Samsung or WD, developed in-house their own controllers.
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