14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to solid-state drives, most of them are made of several chips embedded on a Pcb of some sort, maybe clad in a 2.5-inch metal case as well. The newest one from Silicon Motion is different though.
Essentially, it is a single-chip drive, where everything that a solid-state drive requires is crammed into a single chip.
It limits the capacity of the drive to a great extent, putting it on the same level as a memory card in that regard.
However, it also opens up new options for where the drive can be used, or rather makes it suitable for a segment of the industry that no other SSDs can serve.
To be more specific, the new, single-chip solid-state drive is best suited for embedded applications like in-vehicle infotainment, factory automation, thin clients, POS (point of sale), HMI devices, medical equipment and servers. They can even be used for gaming, at least gaming machines like the ones in arcades.
The new SSD is called Ferri-eMMC and has 100-ball 1.0mm pitch BGA package (ball grid array), which means that it can't be removed from a circuit board once it's set in. Not without ruining everything anyhow.
It is cheaper to manufacture than other embedded SSDs and comes in two versions: SM667 (for high reliability applications that require up to 30K Program/Erase (P/E) cycles) and SM661 (for cost effective systems with less stringent endurance requirements).
Silicon Motion endowed it with JEDEC-standard eMMC 4.5 protocol compliance, error correction, bad block management and NAND health monitoring.
Moving on, the Ferri-eMMC product (or products, since there are two of them) have up to 32 GB capacity (2 GB is the smallest), Advanced ECC management, wear leveling and DataRefresh.
Well, there is a normal version, so to speak, with -25°C to 85°C operating temperature, but the industrial one is good for -40°C to 85°C. Finally, the random performance is of up to 80,000 IOPs.
The Silicon Motion SM667 and SM661 Ferri-eMMC single-chip solid-state drives are only sampling to industrial and enterprise customers for now.
Silicon Motion has also introduced the FerriSSD ultra-high performance single-package SATA 6 Gb/s SSDs, which come in 8 GB to 64 GB configurations and, again, both commercial (0°C to 70°C) and industrial endurance (-40°C to 85°C).
Designed in 90-ball, 1.0 mm ball pitch BGA package, they possess embedded DRAM and, besides advanced ECC and wear leveling, Intelligent Scan and DataRefresh features. They, too, are only sampling.