Micron buys SSD controller maker Tidal Systems

Micron announced the acquisition of Tidal Systems, a startup that developers SSD controller solutions. The company was founded in 2014 by Mike Lee and Dr. Cody Wu, both have an extensive background in the field and have created some of the most advanced NAND controllers in existence.

Lee wa part of Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD) and sold the company to SK Hynix, while Dr. Cody Wu was part of SandForce and is considered a pioneer of next-gen LDPC encoding and decoding. Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) is a sophisticated error correction method that comes in handy for dealing with TLC NAND flash memory, which suffers from higher error rates than MLC memory.

Tom's Hardware concludes this purchase will allow Micron to compete more effectively with Samsung as the company can now create all three major SSD components in-house.

Micron has desperately needed an in-house controller to combat the rise of Samsung in the consumer and enterprise SSD space. Without a controller under the Micron umbrella, the company was forced to rely on third-party SoC makers such as Marvell and Silicon Motion, Inc. to bring products to market.

Until now, Micron only made two of the three vital components needed to build solid-state drive products. That put Micron in a poor position to take advantage of in-house DRAM and NAND production, because the company still had to wait on component partners to release controllers and tune firmware for its specific NAND products.