Exciting news: Marvell's CEO did not say that an expanded relationship with Seagate was for Marvell's SSD controller technology - which we take to mean it is.
Seagate is due to launch its SSD (solid state drive) early in 2009 but the company has no in-house SSD chip fabrication or controller manufacture capabilities. There has been much speculation about where it is going to source both, with an acquisition of STEC mooted at one time, STEC being the supplier of EMC's Symmetrix and Clariion SSDs.
Marvell is a semiconductor company with chip products for communications, consumer products and storage, where it has a flash drive for notebooks and PCs. It has been a long-term supplier of read channel ICs to Seagate and this has expanded to the supply of system-on-a-chip (SOC) products. It is also supplying a SAS controller SOC product to Fujitsu for its coming SAS enterprise drive.
During its Q2 fy09 earnings conference call Marvell CEO Suhat Sutardja said that Marvell sees three SSD markets: enterprise storage and servers; full-feature notebooks where SSDs (for performance) will be used alongside HDDs (for capacity); and MIDs (mobile internet devices or netbooks like the Asus Eee) where SSDs will be the primary storage. Marvell has product available now to sell into the notebook and MIDs markets and a "strategic engagement in place to address" the enterprise server and storage market. There will be early revenue from this later this year but volume ramps in unit shipments will follow much later. Aha - a strategic engagement with who?
In passing, Sutardja said that there was not enough SSD fabrication capacity in place to satisfy the projected demand. The present NAND glut will disappear as demand rises and fabs reach full capacity. Then, as PCs adopt SSDs as a secondary, performance-focussed, storage medium there will clearly not be enough flash manufacturing capacity to support this adoption. It will require years of investment in flash foundries, if the manufacturers take the risk.
He also reckons flash SSDs will co-exist with and not replace hard drives as there will be an SSD price premium and hard drives boost capacity - he sees a 1TB mobile drive coming inside two years. So we'll see PCS using SSD's fpr critical and I/O-bound applications and HDDs used to store bulk data.
In answer to an analyst's question Sutardja refused to specify if the expanded agreement with Seagate was HDD or SSD-focussed. He was "really, really pleased" that Seagate had "a long term committment to technology from Marvell" but he wouldn't talk specifics, preferring to defer it to some time when it was appropriate to do so, i.e. we presume when Seagate makes an announcement.
There's nothing sensitive about expanded HDD technology Seagate is taking from Marvell, witness the SOC chip stuff above. So, the sensitivity is around SSDs and a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. This horse reckons Seagate has alighted on Marvell for its SSD controller technology.
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