I don't believe mDOC is dead, not in IP sense anyway. In fact, it's alive and well in the form of both OneNand and LBA-NAND. Toshiba might have been the first licensee for mDOC back in 1998. I assume that both Samsung and Toshiba are still paying royalties for mDOC.
Based on this assumption, it's not hard to believe that Sandisk had a hand on the cross licensing deal. If so, why did they do it? I think their end goal is to establish a de facto standard for SoC, and the specs will be merged eventually into one. They probably know it's either they do it, or someone else will do it for them in an open system spec.
But first, here's a quote that made me think that Samsung can not escape the mDOC royalty issue. "...Originally, mDOC was a monolithic device that incorporated a controller, a small bit of SRAM, and NAND cells. To be more agile in the market and also to avoid being controlled by the capacity shortages of any one NAND vendor, the company moved the mDOC architecture to a multichip module, where the controller and SRAM are combined on one SOC, and the NAND—from whichever vendor offers the cheapest price at the highest capacity—resides on a second chip." Afterall, it's patented and trademarked as Monolithic Disk on Chip. Toshiba and Samsung could afford to implement it as SoC for obvious reason.
By the way, I agree with you about the advance state of OneNand (and LBA-NAND) since the last time they signed the agreement. |
