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“With the growth in adoption of Linux for data-intensive embedded devices, OEMs need a flash file system that better supports their reliability and performance requirements.” said Roy Sherrill, Datalight CEO. “By supporting the most recent kernel versions of Linux we’re filling that gap in the market with a robust, commercial-grade solution backed by our reputation for responsive, high-quality support.”

FlashFX Tera supports the full range of flash technologies including NAND, NOR, and MLC NAND flash in a single driver. Its patented wear-leveling and bad block management extend the useful life of devices using flash. While FlashFX Tera can be used with virtually any file system, pairing it with Reliance Nitro provides an optimized data storage software stack to simplify system development.

FlashFX Tera 1.2 and Reliance Nitro 1.2 are available immediately from Datalight and the Datalight worldwide network of channel partners. Please visit us at http://www.datalight.com/partners/worldwide-sales-partners to find a reseller near you.

The Reliance family of file systems and FlashFX family of flash media managers comprise the Datalight flash file system solution. Reliance was designed from the ground up for high reliability applications. Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology gives developers full control over performance and data protection characteristics, protecting users from file system corruption, even after unexpected system interruption. Embedded applications can benefit from faster boot times that remain consistent for the life of the product, regardless of disk size. FlashFX™ Tera features pre-written support for over 300 flash parts, works with virtually any NAND controller, and features wear leveling, bad block management, and background compaction for unrivaled performance.

For information, contact:
Kerri McConnell, Director of Marketing
425.686.1069
kerri.mcconnell@datalight.com

About Datalight

Datalight, Inc. headquartered just north of Seattle, Wash., develops technologies to enable risk-free mobile data. Datalight file system and device driver software ensures reliability, performance and flexibility, and is used worldwide on many of today’s most well-known devices.  For more information, visit http://www.datalight.com/, call 800.221.6630 or visit blog at http://blog.datalight.com

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DATALIGHT, Datalight, the Datalight Logo, FlashFX, FlashFX Pro, FlashFX Tera, Reliance, Reliance Nitro, ROM-DOS,  One-Boot, One-Boot+File, and Sockets  are trademarks or registered trademarks of Datalight, Inc. All other product names are trademarks of their respective holders. Specification and price change privileges reserved.

“Datalight continues to raise the standard in delivering advanced file system features for MontaVista Linux,” said Dean Misenhimer, Director of Marketing at MontaVista Software. “Our partnership provides our customers the option of a pre-integrated professional flash file system solution to speed their development of flash-based devices. This ultimately leads to faster time to market with superior performance and reliability.”

FlashFX Tera supports the full range of flash technologies including NAND, NOR, and MLC NAND flash in a single driver. Its patented wear-leveling and bad block management extend the useful life of devices using flash. While FlashFX Tera can be used with virtually any file system, pairing it with Reliance Nitro provides an optimized data storage software stack to simplify system development.

Reliance Nitro version 1.2 also adds support for extended file attributes. Most commonly used to designate file permissions, extended attributes are important to customers using special Linux distributions like SMACK. As data quantity and complexity in devices grows, extended file attributes can also be used for storing additional metadata (data about the data), such as digital rights information, GPS location or any information that makes finding and using the data easier. The ability of Reliance Nitro to serve as the root file system for Linux can simplify the data storage stack for these devices by allowing them to operate with a single file system.

“With the growth in adoption of Linux for data-intensive embedded devices, OEMs need a flash file system that better supports their reliability and performance requirements.” said Roy Sherrill, Datalight CEO. “By migrating our flagship products to Linux we’re filling that gap in the market with a robust, commercial-grade solution backed by our reputation for responsive, high-quality support.”

FlashFX Tera 1.2 and Reliance Nitro 1.2 are available immediately from Datalight and the Datalight worldwide network of channel partners. Please visit us at datalight.com to find a reseller near you.

The Reliance family of file systems and FlashFX family of flash media managers comprise the Datalight flash file system solution. Reliance was designed from the ground up for high reliability applications. Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology gives developers full control over performance and data protection characteristics, protecting users from file system corruption, even after unexpected system interruption. Embedded applications can benefit from faster boot times that remain consistent for the life of the product, regardless of disk size. FlashFX™ Tera features pre-written support for over 300 flash parts, works with virtually any NAND controller, and features wear leveling, bad block management, and background compaction for unrivaled performance.

About Datalight

Datalight, Inc. headquartered just north of Seattle, Wash., develops technologies to enable risk-free mobile data. Datalight file system and device driver software ensures reliability, performance and flexibility, and is used worldwide on many of today’s most well-known devices.  For more information, visit http://www.datalight.com/, call 800.221.6630 or visit blog at http://blog.datalight.com

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DATALIGHT, Datalight, the Datalight Logo, FlashFX, FlashFX Pro, FlashFX Tera, Reliance, Reliance Nitro, ROM-DOS,  One-Boot, One-Boot+File, and Sockets  are trademarks or registered trademarks of Datalight, Inc. All other product names are trademarks of their respective holders. Specification and price change privileges reserved.

“What many silicon vendors refer to as a ‘driver’ is nothing more than the code left over by their inhouse hardware development team. This code typically exercises just a small subset of the device capabilities (or whatever they were working on last) and doesn’t even come close to meeting the definition (or spirit) of a general purpose device driver.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. A lot of our time in developing our FlashFX family of flash memory drivers is spent ensuring completeness, reliability and portability to a wide variety of CPUs and operating systems.

1. Cost – Despite years of oversupply in the flash market, and the corresponding reductions in price, flash is still relatively expensive when compared to HDD, especially on a $/bit basis. To make matters worse, the current economic climate has taken its toll on the flash industry, spurring several rounds of consolidation and requiring flash vendors to curb manufacturing costs by shrinking portfolios and closing fabs. Predictably, these changes in the supply landscape are causing prices rise in many cases, making the cost factor an even bigger problem for flash.

2. Shrinking lithography = lower endurance – One way for flash manufacturers to remain competitive is to use smaller die size to reduce raw material costs. Just a couple years ago, the vast majority of NAND flash was manufactured with 90nm lithography. Most vendors are now planning to move to 30nm technology either this year or next. An unfortunate side-effect of smaller lithography is significantly decreased endurance. SLC NAND, which had 100K + erase cycles, is now predicted to be in the 50-70k range. The biggest impact is on MLC NAND where the endurance has gone from 10k erase cycles to around 3k (a 70% reduction!).

3. Increasing ECC – Another side-effect of shrinking lithography is an increase in error rates for flash, requiring stronger correction codes. Most SLC NAND flash today requires 1-bit correction. That number is predicted to increase to 4-bit on 30nm NOR parts. And the ECC outlook for MLC NAND is even worse, requiring ECCs greater than 12-bit (compared to 4-bit or 8-bit today). These increased ECC requirements mean the controller design for managing flash will become more complicated, and more difficult for OEMs to implement. Performance will also be impacted, especially if the ECC is done in software running on the host processor.

4. Vendor volatility – Churn or volatility in the flash market, the products of a difficult economic climate, are making it difficult for OEMs to find a reliable source of flash parts. Examples are everywhere; A major flash supplier is currently under Chapter 11. There are merger talks happening between SanDisk and Samsung. Asian vendors have been hit especially hard, particularly those also in the DRAM business. OEMs are rightfully concerned about interruptions to their production cycles in the midst of all this turmoil.

5. Lack of killer application – While NAND flash densities have continued to increase, the industry is still waiting for the killer application to gobble up these immense quantities of flash. For long SSDs have been viewed as that application but they have not taken off as fast as the flash industry would have liked.

In spite of the obstacles faced by the industry, flash remains a strong and growing choice for data storage and has put breakthrough devices like MP3 players and smart phones (iPhone!) into the hands of millions of consumers. Early adopters of SSD technology in laptop computers, netbooks and enterprise applications are making a solid case for mass market potential there, which should significantly drive flash adoption in the next few years. Visit the FlashFX Tera page to learn how Datalight is making flash easier and more competitive.

For the first time in more than a decade, people are saving again. In 2007 and years prior, the savings rate hovered around zero as we maxed our credit cards and lines of credit, driving the savings rate into the red and giving the world’s manufacturing base an almost unbelievable boom. In January 2009 though, something unexpected happened; the US savings rate suddenly moved above 5%, the highest in decades. As news of our cloudy economic picture has emerged, consumer behavior is shifting away from status-seeking luxury purchases toward more value-based buying patterns, forcing manufacturers around the world to take notice. And after decades of excess, the shift to thrift is looking like a lasting trend.

But what does this mean for Embedded? As consumers focus on needs over wants, they will increasingly seek out products that are proven durable and reliable.

This will have broad implications for manufacturers of everything from cars to clothing, refrigerators to embedded devices. Today’s consumers are choosing efficiency, durability and value over gee-whiz gadgetry. Consumer mobile OEMs too must focus on delivering value and fewer, more targeted features. Rather than packing devices full of a laundry list of apps and expensive hardware, this means streamlined offerings and more segmented products, while making sure the consumer doesn’t feel like they’re missing out. Motorola’s new EM330 is a prime example of this kind of pared-down, demographic-specific approach. The phone, called the MOTOROKR STAR is marketed specifically toward music lovers, offering a basic clamshell with music recognition software and download-on-the-go at a price point in the sub-$200 range.

As OEMs scramble to add value and enhance their reputations for durability and reliability, Datalight responds with products that support those goals. The combination of flexible flash management that lowers bill of material costs, wear-leveling algorithms extend flash life by several times, and the rock-solid reliability of our file system become essential components of a strategy to provide value to customers.

Many have remarked that markets are driven by a combination of fear and greed. Though the pendulum has recently taken a dramatic –and we believe temporary– move in the direction of fear, ultimately we know a move away from excess is good for all of us and good for the world we live in. Here’s hoping the trend toward value and quality is a long-lasting one.

1.    Cost
The cost of managed NAND parts is coming down, but the stuff still sells at a premium over its raw NAND brethren. 

2.    Flash Optimization
There are many new features of NAND available to us today.  Performance features such as cached reads, multi-plane operations, concurrency, and others are becoming invaluable to keep performance at the ever-increasing demands of portable media. The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) has defined a standard method to query the capabilities and characteristics of NAND flash which can be put to use by both software and hardware systems. A software media manager offers the flexibility to take advantage of the most current flash memory features and put them to use efficiently, or to avoid certain features that may be unproven or problematic. A software solution will allow a developer to take full advantage of the media’s characteristics and features unburdened by the indirection or inability for the hardware to expose them.

3.    Visibility/Flexibility
Software (in general) is easily inspected and validated. Features such as wear-leveling move data around the flash device to optimize its life expectancy. Without the ability to inspect source code, a managed NAND solution makes it difficult to validate wear-leveling operation and/or characterize its effect on performance and reliability.  Hardware implementations are often generalized to suit a majority of use cases, while a software solution is easily tailored to the specific use case during development.

4.    Performance
Speaking of use cases, there are many system features that are not available to hardware that may make a generalized hardware solution less advantageous to a specific use case.  For example, system idle time can be used to improve the media performance by scheduling background cache operations and compaction to occur then.  Coordination between the file system and flash media manager can further optimize operations by freeing space when it will no longer be needed and having the media manager code cache certain regions of the flash where meta data might be held. Migrating flash management features to hardware removes this ability to coordinate with other components of the software stack, such as file systems.

5.    Reliability
Lest you think we believe that everything is better left to software, consider error detection and correction (EDC). Error rates are increasing substantially as flash manufacturers push the limits of physics.  Errors can be introduced externally by heat or other radiation, during writes or reads of data, and even to data that was successfully written at a different time. Historically SLC NAND flash required only a single bit error detection and correction (a hamming code is usually sufficient), while MLC parts require minimally four bit EDC.  As the die sizes continue to shrink, error rates will continue to increase, even for SLC flash. 
Calculating the codes to detect and correct such errors is getting increasingly complex and solving such a solution in software for higher-bit EDCs (above 4-bit) is time consuming and often unacceptably slow.  Hardware ECC is a necessary requirement for systems with high EDC requirements and where performance is a concern.

Many of the processors on the market today are incorporating EDC in their NAND controllers. Choosing one of these processors (e.g. TI OMAP 35xx) in combination with raw NAND flash and software management can give you the high-performance EDC to handle next generation flash while maintaining the design flexibility that a software manager provides.

Flash manufacturers have much to gain by adding ECC code into their NAND flash parts.  They know better than anyone what kind of ECC is necessary for a specific part and by adding just that one piece of hardware to their offerings, rather than the jack of all trades, master of none approach of complete flash management, they will better serve the markets. 

In short, features should reside where they can be handled most efficiently; ECCs belong in hardware, other flash management functions belong in software.  While managed NAND certainly has its place and its appeal in the market, we believe the best combination of value, performance and flexibility lies in using a combination of raw NAND and hardware with built-in ECC capabilities.