Solid state drives have come a long way both in terms of performance and capacity. Prices have come down significantly as well yet compared to traditional storage solutions they are hardly ever justifiable for the average user. JMicron intends to take a big step towards changing that, with claims that it has come up with a breakthrough design which could see current prices slashed by up to 50 percent.
Dubbed JMF612, the new NAND flash controller uses an ARM9 core in a 289-ball TFBGA package, and will support the use of up to 256MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM as an external cache. It should also address the frustrating performance issues that plagued the company's previous JMF602 controller and make drives easier to manufacture. This, combined with higher flash densities made possible by 32nm NAND technology, will reportedly see a "new generation" of SSDs come to market for half their current prices by the end of 2009.