Memory Industry Analyst Jim Handy took the unusual step of sending out an alert yesterday. The topic of the alert was the announced acquisition of Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD) by SK Hynix for a reported US $248 million. LAMD is a long-time supplier of read-channel chips but the SK Hynix press release only discusses LAMD’s relatively new foray into NAND Flash controller chips: “Upon completion of the acquisition, LAMD will join SK Hynix as a business unit focused on customized NAND based solutions.”
Very recently, Corsair announced an SSD with one of those LAMD NAND Flash controllers inside. (See “Corsair does the Neutron dance with new line of fast SSDs based on Toggle NAND Flash”) The controller chip in the Corasir Neutron SSD is the LM87800 SSD controller from Link_A_Media.
SK Hynix has also been in the news a lot lately as noted in this blog post from the Denali Memory Report: “SK Hynix places bet on third wannabe non-volatile memory technology, phase-change memory, with IBM.” It appears that SK Hynix is playing a lot of cards on acquiring the technologies needed for future SSD manufacturing.
Referring back to Handy’s alert:
“This is the fourth SSD controller company to be acquired recently:
- In March of last year OCZ acquired Indilinx
- LSI acquired SandForce in October
- December brought Apple’s acquisition of Anobit
- Now SK Hynix has acquired Link_A_Media
The SandForce and Anobit acquisitions were explored blog post in Handy’s blog The SSD Guy
Denali Memory Report 
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