From SK Hynix's Q2 earnings release.....
For the NAND business, the company will maintain a prudent stance for investments considering demand conditions and profitability-first discipline, while continuing with product developments in preparation for improvements in market conditions. Particularly, it will expand sales of QLC-based high-capacity eSSD and build 321-high NAND-based product portfolio to enhance its market leadership.
https://news.skhynix.com/sk-hynix-announces-2q25-financial-results/
I think it's good for SIMO that when SK talks about NAND they specifically mention the high capacity QLC SSDs. That's the area that SIMO says they have unique technologies and greater experience than other controller makers, and that the new SImo enterprise flash controller chip (Mon Titan) may be deployed soon in 128GB QLC NAND SSDs.
Here's SIMO discussing QLC SSDs in their Q1 2025 call:
One area where we are benefiting from both increasing NAND costs and the potentially negative pricing impact of tariffs is a rapidly growing interest in QLC NAND. QLC allows server and device makers the ability to significantly increasing memory density in a cost-effective manner given OEM's opportunity to deliver higher density storage solutions at a more reasonable price.
As we have discussed during the past few investor calls, we believe we are the best position to benefit from the increased adoption of QLC given that we have more experience managing QLCs than any other controller maker.
We are experiencing significant inbound interest for developing QLC products across the enterprise market like iTunes [ph] and the consumer market for both SSD and smartphones. And we expect to deliver multiple new products in the coming months that will capitalize on this interest and help us deliver long-term sustainable revenue and earning growth for many years to come.
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And here's SIMO discussing how high capacity QLC SSDs may be deployed in NVidia products beginning in H2 2025:
Additionally, each BlueField-3 DPU will be paired with multiple high-density enterprise class QLC SSD through PCIe switches. Currently, Solidigm is the only company shipping a high-density 122-terabyte QLC enterprise SSD in the market. And we expect to be the second providing a 128-terabyte QLC MonTitan SSD turnkey solution to our customers later this year.
We are thrilled to be growing part of NVIDIA storage ecosystem, providing enterprise boot storage and high-density 128-terabyte MonTitan enterprise data storage solution for AI. These solutions deliver ASP that are significantly above our current corporate average with accretive gross margins. As our MonTitan product portfolio evolves, we look forward to engaging with new customers to expand our addressable market in other areas as we are currently doing with BlueField.
To that end, we are currently focused on delivering a more complete family of MonTitan products, including controller for SATA and PCIe server boost drive, higher density and performance 8-channel and 16-channel controller for AI storage application. With MonTitan supporting the upcoming 2 terabit monolithic die QLC NAND, we will be able to deliver high-density, high-performance 128 terabyte SSD with a best-in-class brand reach of 3.5 million IOPS, putting us in a great position to rapidly expand our market share in the large and growing market for AI storage solution. |
