OCZ Technology Group, a leading manufacturer of solid-state drives, said that its next-generation controller for solid-state drives have already taped out and that samples of SSDs powered by the new chip will be out in August or September. The company promises that the new controller will boost performance of SSDs compared to existing products.

"We have recently gave out our next generation Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller [to production] and expect to receive sample silicon back from our foundry partner TSMC in coming weeks. We expect to begin sampling SSDs on this controller in the August to September timeframe. We expect to have SSD sales related to Barefoot 3 in the third fiscal quarter," said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ, during a conference call with financial analysts.

The OCZ/Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller utilizes internally designed - the first time for OCZ - Aragon 400MHz 32-bit processor. The Aragon core supports an SSD specific RISC instruction set, allowing most instructions and branches to be executed in a single cycle, OCZ claims. The chip is set to be made using  65nm process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. OCZ believes that the new Barefoot 3 SoC will significantly boost performance of its SSDs.

"Initial specifications indicate that Barefoot 3 will support a significant performance increase over our current products and as its primary IT blocks are now licensed from a third party, it provides additional incremental cost benefits to OCZ," noted Mr. Petersen.

In addition to performance gain, OCZ expects Barefoot 3 controller to cut its costs. Moreover, with the new Indilinx controller the firm expects to make offerings that will change the world of SSDs in general.

"When implemented in SSD controller, this the [Aragon 3 core gives] a much higher performance than when using an off-the-shelf embedded safety field. This design opens a world of new possibilities for game changing SSD solutions as it supports unprecedented levels of processing power," commented the head of OCZ.

Tags: OCZ, Barefoot, Indilinx, SSD, NAND, Flash