China Catching Up to the Competition
As powerful as China is as a manufacturing superpower, they are behind other countries in one aspect. That is when it comes to developing their own semiconductor and chip technology. The Chinese government is of course, fully well aware of this. In fact, they are investing heavily on local manufacturers to bring them up to competitive speed.
For now, China is at the mercy of South Korea, Japan and the US/Taiwan when it comes to storage technology. Chinese companies have no choice but to rely on other countries to design and produce everything from controllers down to the memory chips. This of course, translates to billions and billions that is not benefiting China directly. Other countries have even accused the country and its companies of stealing technology and intellectual property to speed up their development.
Now it appears that Chinese storage manufacturing is finally catching up. In fact Longsys has announced (via DigiTimes) their plans to release the first “100% China-Made” solid-state drive.
What Kind of Hardware Will Be Inside These Longsys SSDs?
According to DigiTimes, Longsys will adopt controller chips developed in-house by Yeetor Microelectronics and Maxio Technology in the new flash storage product. Additionally, it will have Payton technology and Zhen Kun Technology provide backend services for it.
The NAND chips themselves will come from Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC). YMTC disclosed previously plans to move a newer 64-layer 3D NAND process to volume production in the fourth quarter of 2019. After, they will move directly to the 128-layer generation with volume production scheduled for 2020.
Longsys has acquired the Lexar brand from Micron in 2017. So when these do become available outside of China, we will probably see these configurations sold under that brand.
