Good Bye MLC: Indilinx's 2nd Gen SSD Controller to Support TLC Flash?

Watching movies for Easter is a family tradition. This time around, I got interrupted by a very interesting story coming out of South Korea. On Easter Morning Asian time, our source came forward to tell us that SSD controller maker Indilinx is finishing work on their second generation silicon which brings interesting innovation.

Maker of Barefoot and Amigos SSD controllers is bringing the support for Triple Level Cell NAND Flash i.e. TLC. Following SLC (single bit per cell), MLC (multi bit per cell, in reality two bits per cell) - TLC is the memory cell that is expected to bring SSDs into the mainstream, reducing the cost from one and increasing the capacity from the other side.

Back in August 2010, Intel and Micron demonstrated the 25nm TLC NAND flash and then went into the silent mode as far as technology is concerned. According to our sources, that is changing as first production-grade TLC NAND is becoming available from leading NAND manufacturers. Single chip is consisted out of 8GB (64 Gigabits), and should go for $8-9 in 1000 unit quantities.

According to iSuppli, the price of 1GB of TLC NAND flash memory is supposed to be around a dollar mark, down from $1.20 currently charged for 1GB of MLC NAND flash. For comparison, 1GB of SLC NAND will set you back for $5 - a clear 5x price difference.

Given that Indilinx is now owned by OCZ Technology, it would be logical to expect seeing first TLC-based SSDs from OCZ. We're not certain about the future availability of Indilinx controllers to other clients, such as Corsair, MaxFlash, Mushkin, TEAM and others.

All in all, it looks like things are really heating up in the SSD arena.