Seagate makes equity investment in eASIC

eASIC Corp. has revealed a strategic equity investment by Seagate Technology. The companies are also exploring opportunities to develop custom silicon solutions for Seagate's portfolio of solid state drives (SSD) that would combine Seagate's expertise in SSD with eASIC's expertise in fast time-to-market, low-cost and low-power custom silicon solutions.

As Flash memory continues to evolve at a rapid pace from 2 bits per cell, 1xnm (MLC) to 3 bits per cell 1xnm (TLC) and the industry continues to adopt a wide variety of host interfaces such as PCI Express, NVMe and SoP (SCSI over PCI Express), Seagate and eASIC seek to deliver high-performance, low-cost and low-power SSD solutions for the consumer, enterprise and cloud computing.

"eASIC has demonstrated innovative custom silicon technology with our industry-leading solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs)", said Rocky Pimentel, chief sales and marketing officer at Seagate. "eASIC's ability to quickly develop custom differentiated solutions while meeting stringent cost, power and performance requirements will enable us to rapidly deliver storage solutions and improve our product position in both SSD and SSHD's."

"We are extremely excited to be working with one of the world leaders in storage technology," said Ronnie Vasishta, president and CEO of eASIC. "Seagate has an exceptional history in bringing world class technology and innovation to the storage market. Using our eASIC Nextreme-3 28nm single via configuration technology will help Seagate to bring storage innovation at a pace not yet seen in this industry," added Vasishta.