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Technology Stocks : WDC, NAND, NVM, enterprise storage systems, etc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiliconAlley who wrote (4532)	12/15/2020 10:49:45 PM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4824

Great article about NAND flash controllers, and the reason why major NAND players differentiate their product via in-house custom controllers. Western Digital happens to be the leader in this regard, with their flexible ASIC platform. You don't believe WDC ships more in house controllers than Samsung, do you? In eMMC controllers Samsung and SIMO were the two dominant companies with share of 60%-65% and 30%-35% respectively. Not sure what the current split is for UFS between Samsung, SK and MU-SIMO. To my knowledge WDC without an ability to make mobile DRAM isn't even a meaningful player in the eMMC-UFS controller market. WDC makes some SSD controllers, and purchases others from merchant providers. How many SSD and eMMC controllers does WDC ship every year? Any idea? I didn't think so..... SIMO says it's total share of all SSD controllers is about 33%, and heading toward 40%, or more, over the coming years. What's WDC's share of SSD controllers shipped, and are they gaining or losing share? If you think WDC is gaining market share in the past few years in either client or enterprise SSDs I'd love to see the evidence. WDC often uses it's own controllers for SSDs. Are they gaining SSD share from 2018 to present? This data is hard to come by, if you have it I'd love to see it. In the big picture WDC is at a disadvantage to a merchant controller maker like SIMO. WDC only "sells" its controllers to itself. SIMO can make the same controller, and sell it to 20 module makers and 3-7 NAND makers. Obviously SIMO has lots more opportunity to regain the development cost since SIMO has more customers for its controllers than WDC has (one). My understanding is Samsung makes the best SSD controllers, and SIMO recently has put themselves at parity with Samsung, but this view shifts with each new generation of controllers. For Gen4 PCIe NVME SIMO has FIVE NAND makers as customers, which are likely Intel, WDC, MU, Toshiba and SK Hynix. It's possible that WDC or Toshiba are not customers for this chip, and the new Chinese Tsinghua NAND maker is one of the five customers, who knows? SIMO will sell these same Gen4 PCIe NVME controllers lots loads of module makers (aData, Kingston, Transcend, etc.) and even PC makers who want to assemble their own SSDs. That's a lot of customers. WDC has to spend the same (or more) as SIMO to develop and manufacture the same controller, and will have only itself to sell it to. In this market (PCs) high volume low cost wins. Unless WDC is massively gaining share on the other NAND makers for some reason, they'd be better of just buying their client PC controllers from SIMO and spending their limited resources elsewhere. Is WDC gaining significant share in PC SSDs? I doubt it, but I don't know.