14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that, once again, a company seeks to establish a partnership of sorts with another, with the goal of expanding its marketing prowess by accessing IP useful in its business practices.
Kingston is best known for its memory products, the many DRAM modules and kits that it provides for desktops and laptops alike.
Still, since the segment took off, the outfit has also been involved in solid state drives, and it appears that it wants to improve its foothold in this industry.
This is not surprising, considering how quickly such storage devices have been gaining traction.
As a recent report from Digitimes has it, the outfit is considering a partnership with a certain specialist in solid state drive controller technologies.
The company in question is JMicron and will supposedly host a special investors meeting on January 25, where a proposal will be passed for the raising of new funds via a private placement.
Originally, Toshiba was the investor they were considering, but concerns arose regarding the relationship with other chip sources.
Acquiring a stake in JMicron may actually make more sense for Kingston, considering that it has been collaborating with the company for some time already.
It was in the second half of 2010 that Kingston began to build solid state drives using JMicron's storage controllers.
Meanwhile, the latter was able to sell over one million such controller chips for the whole of last year, 30% of which were covered by Kingston itself.
It is also a known fact that Kingston has begun to more seriously tackle the SSD market, having pushed low-price units and encouraging sales of models with 64 GB to 512 GB capacities.
Should such a deal be made, the memory and SSD maker will have increased its existing list of controller design firms it holds stakes in, them being Phison Electronics, Skymedi and Solid State System (3S).