JEDEC, the developer of standards in microelectronics industry, is inviting companies worldwide to participate in standards development work being conducted by JEDEC’s JC-64.8 subcommittee for solid state drives (SSDs). The organization promises to set standards for SSDs in 2009.

“It’s clear that the industry must adopt comprehensive standards for solid state drives to ensure complete confidence in the quality and reliability of SSDs. JEDEC is bringing companies from all over the world together to collaborate on the SSD standards development in a time-efficient manner,” said Mian Quddus, chairman of the JEDEC board-of-directors.

In May 2008, the subcommittee, co-chaired by Seagate and Micron, held its first meeting to address the standards development needs of the emerging SSD market. With active support from the leading industry companies, work has advanced at a rapid pace, and a task group of the subcommittee recently held a face-to-face meeting hosted by Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

Meeting participants developed an outline of critical areas for SSD standardization, including:

• Endurance
• Retention
• BER/UBER (bit error rate/uncorrectable bit error rate)
• Environmental/temperature:
  • Ambient non-condensing
  • Altitude
  • Solder reliability
• Capacity
• Performance/workload
• Power – idle, standby, power-up
• Form factor
• Drive statistics
• Reliability (MTBF vs AFR
• Command operations:
  • Encryption
  • Secure erase

While work has commenced, JEDEC recognizes that significant portions of key proposed documents need to be created without delay in order to meet the pressing need for comprehensive SSD standards.

Work will involve various JC-64 subcommittees, JEDEC committees JC-11, JC-14 and JC-16, and external standards organizations such as the T10 and T13 technical committees of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and others. JC-64.8 will begin holding face-to-face meetings nearly every month beginning in January, following a regularly scheduled committee meeting on December 1, 2008.

JEDEC strongly encourages all interested parties to contact the JEDEC office to become involved with SSD standards development.

Tags: JEDEC, Flash, SSD