SANDISK WAS SHOWING off a very unique product at CES, a SATA SSD on a chip. No, not a flash chip, but a full flash chip plus SATA interface on a single piece of silicon.
The full drive
The ‘drives’ themselves come in packages up to 64GB, not exactly massive, but more than good enough for a space constrained embedded device. Sandisk didn’t comment on the construction, but it is very unlikely to be anything but a stacked chip package of flash dies plus a SATA controller.
More interesting are the pinouts. If you look, there are very few pins on that part, very few indeed. The pin count for a SATA port is very small, the smaller of the two connectors on the back of a SATA drive is for data, the big one for power. If you look at this Sandisk drive/chip, you can see that the device is definitely not pad bound.
This drive/chip is at the forefront of packaging technology. It may be a nifty oddity to mainstream consumers, but it seriously pushes the bounds of what can be done in ASIC construction. Well done Sandisk.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
Latest posts by Charlie Demerjian (see all)
- Covid-19 is hitting component supplies already - Feb 17, 2020
- Centaur CHA x86 AI CPU pictured - Feb 17, 2020
- One more tidbit about Cascade Lake Refresh pricing - Feb 10, 2020
- Intel officially craters Xeon pricing - Feb 6, 2020
- What caused Intel’s DCG/DPG Q4 2020 sales jump? - Jan 27, 2020
