Western Digital, the second-largest hard disk drive maker in the world
behind Seagate Technology, said March 30 it had acquired neighboring SiliconSystems
for $65 million in cash.
WD is located in Lake Forest, Calif.,
only a few miles from SiliconSystems' headquarters in Aliso
Viejo, Calif.
SiliconSystems, founded in 2002, is a major supplier of embedded SSDs
(solid-state drives), and its SiliconDrive products are used in the network communications,
industrial, embedded computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These
markets accounted for approximately one-third of worldwide SSD
revenues in 2008, the company said.
For a look at the latest wave of SSD offerings, click here.
SiliconSystems' product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA (Serial
ATA), EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces
in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors.
Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems becoming the WD
Solid-State Storage business unit..
Western
Digital toyed with the idea of buying Fujitsu's spinning disk drive business
in 2008 but didn't, due to the decline of the dollar compared with the yen.
Toshiba then stepped in and acquired the Fujitsu hard drive division.
That's apparently when WD decided to invest in SSDs.
"WD is no stranger to SSDs, having dabbled in the technology in the early
1990s and being a founding investor of SanDisk, which also developed
flash-based SSDs in the same time period," said Gregory Wong, an analyst
with Forward Insights.
"However, it appears that early experience wasn't enough for a latecomer
to catch up to the vast improvements in performance and reliability made by SSD
vendors recently. System-level solutions, particularly on the firmware side,
are required to manage the increasing complexities of NAND flash with each new
technology generation."
WD will now be able to leverage SiliconSystems' know-how and IP to accelerate
its SSD development, Wong said.
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