Lightspeed Venture Partners – Creating an advanced technology SSD Consortium

After reviewing the latest funding of Link-a-Media, a two year start-up focusing on data recovery for both HDs and SSDs, Lightspeed Venture Partners seems to have the vision to provide funding for the most advanced technology needed for building the next generation of SSDs. Chris Schaepe, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners has been instrumental in selectively choosing to promote each aspect of the future SSD system. 

After reviewing the latest funding of Link-a-Media, a two year start-up focusing on data recovery for both HDs and SSDs, Lightspeed Venture Partners seems to have the vision to provide funding for the most advanced technology needed for building the next generation of SSDs. Chris Schaepe, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners has been instrumental in selectively choosing to promote each aspect of this future SSD system. 

 

For replacing or extending NAND Flash media, Lightspeed has backed Unity Semiconductor that is close to producing CMOx. This resistivity-type of NAND replacement memory, CMOx is slated to scale below 20nm, can be stacked with four layers in the same die and can have multi-levels (MLC), which means its cost should be 25% of NAND and chip density able to reach 1 Terabit by 2016. 

 

In the data recovery market, Link_A_Media Devices has developed semiconductor SoC solutions for the data storage market, not quite a full blown controller. Its mixed signal processing and iterative data recovery technologies enable hard disk drive (HDD) and solid-state drive (SSD) OEMs to obtain much higher densities, optimum drive yields and the lowest power consumption. This SoC will be able to handle and recover 2-bit/3-bit/4-bit per cell MLC signals stored in NAND (silicon) and other media that will be increasingly more difficult to process at sub-3xnm process geometries.  

 

For the high performance SSD market, Lightspeed is backing Pilant Technology who is producing high end enterprise performance SSDs. These Pilant SSD systems are able to sustain high throughput and minimal IOPS deterioration on their long term usage. Pilant SSDs are now shipping to select enterprise companies.

 

Finally, Lightspeed continues to fund Fusion-io another PCIe high performance Flash-based SSD system manufacturer that is making great strides in promoting SSDs in the enterprise. ioMemory, ioDrive and ioDrive Duo are the most advanced NAND clustering technologies designed to improve the server application memory and storage performance of any server to match the I/O performance of the fastest enterprise SAN. Fusion-io was recently funded and backed by Samsung investment and technologies as an endorsement signifying Fusion-io’s potential. 

 

Although, Lightspeed has only partially invested into these four SSD companies to the tune of tens of millions, Lightspeed has set a high standard for other venture capital and equity companies to try to emulate. The Lightspeed Advanced Technology SSD Consortium looks to be quite a winner, especially as the pieces come together.  

This author consults with leading institutions through GLG