Solutions-to-Silicon
Storage-to-Silicon
ARC’s Market Leading Storage-to-Silicon Solution is the de-facto Controller Standard in Today’s Flash Memory Applications
 ARC 600 core family provides high-scalability that is highly effective in addressing a wide range of performance requirements, while keeping dynamic power consumption and leakage at the bare minimum. ARC’s market leadership in flash controllers is based on superior low power, small core size in conjunction with extremely good code density, while still providing best in class computing performance.
Analyzing the bill of materials for a state-of-the-art smartphone reveals the fact that the flash memory component is by far the most expensive item. To maintain leadership in this market, ARC’s technology therefore enables customers to increase the number of bits per cell to 4 bits (today). Applications from Sandisk, STEC, Skymedi, Densbits and others make ARC controllers the de-facto standard in the flash market.
ARC cores provide sufficient computing power to support a wide range of different application specific tasks within a flash memory device:
Memory Allocation Tables
Memory Array Defect Bypassing
Error Correction
Compression
En-/Decryption
Wear-Levelling (in particular Alternating Block Access, Cell Redundancy and Bad Cell Tagging)
Advanced Buffering
Multi-Datapath Control
Besides these low-level tasks ARC’s small footprint cores also enable execution of algorithms for further reduction of flash programming time (write access). Customers using ARC-powered flash memory devices are able to save a significant amount of programming time. During 2008 Flash Memory Summit at Santa Clara, the following example has been presented: Consider a Top 5 cell phone manufacturer who delivers around 90 million units - even a minor programming time reduction for the flash memory in the range of 0.001sec already results in time savings in the production process in the range of days.
“... ARC’s 605 is an ideal starting point for DensBits as it provides high-scalability that can be useful to address range performance requirements while keeping power consumption and leakage at the bare minimum. ARC is undoubtedly the flash controller market core of choice, where superior low power, small core size, extreme code size efficiency were dominating factors in our selection criteria ... &rdquo
-Ilan Hen, CEO DensBits
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To further reduce the area needed for the controller portion within a flash memory device , ARC provides an ‘Automated Overlay Manager (AOM)’ that automatically copies code from slow (but bigger) external memory in the core. Once overlay code is present in local memory, access takes just a single cycle and is therefore deterministic. AOM does not require any additional hardware resource beyond local memory and a path to external memory. This automated solution from ARC enables users to take advantage of executing code in a small memory footprint and to stream code in/out whenever needed. At the same time, it does not have any impact in terms of overall memory usage or debugability.
For further information on ARC’s Storage-to-Silicon Solution please contact your local ARC representative.
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