White’s 4 GB SSD chip

Everyone’s got a Solid-State Drive (SSD), but not everyone’s got the street cred in rugged components like White Electronic Designs. The company’s new NAND SSD product line (which strangely has no name or number at press time) is designed specifically for “demanding defense and aerospace applications.” Coincidentally … so is VME! Constructed using SLC NAND flash, which is less dense than MLC but significantly more reliable and less subject to wear-out, the SSDs are available in moderate-for-now densities of 1, 2, and 4 GB. Packaged in a 22 mm x 27 mm Plastic BGA (PBGA), the disk incorporates a 32-bit RISC CPU to act as the storage controller, managing wear leveling, error correction, and power loss data writes. The family of devices can operate on either 3.3 VDC or 5 VDC and supports ATA, PCMCIA 2.1, and CompactFlash (3.0 and 4.0) interfaces. Of course, the SSDs are designed to operate over an extremely wide temperature range.