Solid State System Co., Ltd. selects Andes AndesCore™ N9 for Its SSS6131 USB 3.1 Gen 1 Flash Controller Highly Demand for Storage Application

N9 Executes Flash Control in the SSS6131 USB 3.1 Gen 1 Flash Controller

Including Read, Write, Erase, ECC, and Load Leveling Functions

HSINCHU, TAIWAN – Andes Technology Corporation, the leading Asia-based supplier of small, low-power, high performance 32/64-bit embedded CPU cores, today announced that Solid State System Co., Ltd. (3S) has licensed the mid-range AndesCore™ N903A for the SSS6131 USB 3.1 Gen 1 flash controller chip. The chip is being designed into USB flash drives now. USB 3.1 Gen 1 is capable of data transfer speeding up to 5Gbps. The 5-stage pipeline N9 is ideal for providing USB 3.1 Gen 1 flash control functions such as read, write, erase, and static and dynamic wear-leveling functions unique to managing flash.

“Andes N9 provided the flexibility and performance required for our industry leading SSS6131 USB 3.1 Gen 1 controller,” said Cheng Liou R&D Vice President Solid State System Co., Ltd. “It allows our design to exploit the performance enhancements of the USB 3.1 Gen1 standard including an interface bandwidth increase up to 5Gbps. USB 3.1 Gen1 flash drives have seen considerably increased demand, especially in Asia. Our SSS6131 USB 3.1 Gen 1 controller has benefitted from this demand.”

“3S is a longtime Andes customer and we value their business.” said Andes Technology Corp. CTO and Senior Vice President Charlie Hong-Men Su. “We are extremely pleased that Andes N9 CPU core, which is more power efficient (DMIPS/mW) than our major competitor, contributes to the success of 3S SSS6131 USB 3.1 Gen 1 flash controller chip in the market place.”

In the Transparency Market Research report “USB 3.0 Flash Drives Market (Manufacturing Process – Conventional and Chip-on-Board; Capacity – Below 4 GB, 4 GB to 16 GB, 16 GB to 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB and Above) – Global (The U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific) Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 – 2020,” the flash drive market is expected to grow 23.5 percent from 2016 to 2020, reaching over $3B by 2020. “Asia Pacific had been the leading region in the global USB 3.0 flash drives market in terms of production volume as well as demand volume,” the report declared. (USB 3.0, the third major revision to the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard, has been renamed USB 3.1 Gen 1 by the USB Implementers Forum).

About Solid State System Co., Ltd. (3S)
Founded in 1998, 3S is well known for its NAND flash knowledge and experiences in storage. 3S has pioneered NAND-based controller solutions and is expanding its product portfolios.  Headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, with branch offices located in Taipei and Shenzhen, China; 3S was listed for Taipei Exchange trading in Year 2007 (Stock symbol: 3259). 3S has an international reputation for providing high performance IC solutions with high reliability and on-time delivery. In 2010, 3S successfully developed and launched its CMOS MEMS microphone. With a critical patent portfolio, 3S is the first Taiwan IC design house to offer advanced microphone solutions easily integrated into customer designs.

For more information, visit http://www.3system.com.tw

About Andes
Andes Technology Corporation was founded in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan in 2005 to develop innovative high-performance/low-power 32/64-bit processor cores and associated development environment to serve worldwide rapidly growing embedded system applications. The company delivers the best super low power CPU cores with integrated development environment and associated software and hardware solutions for efficient SoC design.  
 
To meet demanding requirements of today’s electronic devices, Andes Technology delivers configurable software/hardware IP and scalable platforms to respond to customers’ needs for quality products and faster time-to-market. Andes Technology’s comprehensive CPU includes entry-level, mid-range, high-end, extensible and security families to address the full range of embedded electronics products, especially for connected, smart and green applications.
 

For more information about Andes Technology, please visit http://www.andestech.com/
 

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Andes Processors Are Not Susceptible to Meltdown and Spectre Attacks

HSINCHU, TAIWAN – January 24, 2018 – Recent reports on two security vulnerabilities for processors spanning multiple instruction set architectures have brought the security of processor hardware to high attention worldwide. With years of experience on developing embedded processors for the industry and world markets, Andes Technology Corporation is determined to ensure the security of embedded systems built on Andes processors. Andes announced today, after its thorough review, none of its processors are affected by either Meltdown or Spectre flaws.

“Security is a major concern in SoC designs of Andes customers and we have been watching closely the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, which exploit speculative execution to steal sensitive data, ” said Dr. Charlie Su, CTO and Senior VP of R&D of Andes Technology Corp. “After detailed analysis, we conclude that all AndesCore™ processors are immune to both attacks due to the way our processor pipelines are designed. No subsequent accesses will be possible when privilege violations are encountered in our designs and our branch speculation does not allow subsequent instructions to go too far to allow side-channel information leak. Additionally, our secure AndesCore S8 processor not only offers strong protection against unauthorized accesses such as Meltdown and Spectre, but also strives to not leak information under physical attacks such as high energy radiation attacks.”

“While the whole world is watching the further development of the incident, Andes takes initiative to review and announce the review result to ensure that our customers are not vulnerable. Since none of the Andes processors are affected, no mitigations are needed for Andes embedded SoCs,” stated Andes President, Frankwell Jyh-Ming Lin. “However, for the benefit of strengthening the security of AndesCore processors, Andes continues to track the latest analysis and updates on processor security issues as references for our future processor designs.”

Andes provides N, D, E, S and NX families of AndesCore processors. While it is the primary goal of the S family processors to serve as heavy-armored security processors, Andes recognizes that processors of the rest of AndesCore families may also need to process confidential information in open environments with security concerns. As the level of attention to the security of processor hardware is ever-increasing, Andes is committed to invest heavily on robustness of security features of all its processor products. 

For more information, e-mail info@andestech.com

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