May 24, 2023

Leaders in flash memory management technology will provide comprehensive design, testing services to industrial, automotive, medical, and aerospace sectors.

Tuxera and NplusT, two leaders in flash memory management technology, announced a partnership to provide a novel suite of value-added services, from flash testing and characterization to advanced flash management software. The partnership is aimed at helping customers bring safety-critical and high-reliability products to market more quickly and at lower costs.

Based in Finland, Tuxera is an international leader in developing quality-assured software for flash management, file system management, and networking, powering billions of devices, cars, and public cloud platforms worldwide. NplusT, located in Italy and known for shortening development times for its customers, is a provider of the fastest and most affordable solutions for characterization, testing and reliability verification of NAND and other non-volatile memory devices.

Officials of the two companies described their new partnership as “the best of both worlds.”

“NplusT has great experience on the hardware side—how to do NAND characterization, how to help the customer design the device so that they can produce it quickly, and all the while removing some of the risks,” said Marko Finnig, Vice President of Product Management at Tuxera. “So then the question is, how do you actually manage the NAND? That’s where Tuxera comes in. We create the flash translation layer, software that manages the NAND, and the file system on top of it. This allows our customers to create cost-effective devices that are reliable. So you get the best of both worlds—you get the cost-effectiveness, but you also get the reliability.”

“Tuxera has great software for managing storage at a high level, independent of component management,” said Tamas Kerekes, President and CEO of NplusT. “What NplusT adds to Tuxera is low-level memory know-how, which is critical and important in two areas. There is the NAND chip itself, which requires very specific algorithms, which is one area of our expertise, coming from working with customers in the characterization. And the other is our knowledge of new memory technologies and characterization with semiconductor manufacturers.”

Kerekes said the partnership unites the strengths of his company and Tuxera to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

“This kind of strong cooperation between companies can create a much better product than what comes from trying to integrate two products from different companies,” Kerekes added. “We can do native integrations, which will deliver more performant and reliable results in the end.”

Tuxera and NplusT see the partnership as bringing benefits to both companies’ client bases, as it will introduce NplusT’s capabilities in flash memory testing to Tuxera’s broad spectrum of industry clients, and connect Tuxera’s flash controller and flash enablement software to the semiconductor manufacturers with whom NplusT works closely.

The partnership also will open the door to potential joint research and development efforts that can create solutions to better serve the needs of Tuxera’s and NplusT’s customers in the embedded market, the companies said.

Unlike traditional partnerships, the association between Tuxera and NplusT is not tied to the production of a specific product but instead is a comprehensive package of services that can be tailored to specific clients. Tuxera and NplusT encourage potential customers to contact them early in the product design phases in order to best leverage the companies’ full complement of skills.



April 3, 2023

Every year, the Most Creative Customer Award highlights and rewards the most advanced and creative utilization of NplusT’s products and services. The 2022 MoCCA has been awarded to STMicroelectronics Automotive Digital FA Team, for their activities setting up a failure analysis solution for embedded PCM memories. The ST team is managed by Peter Cini, Automotive and Discrete Group (ADG) Digital FA Manager; the project manager is Sergio Scrofani, ADG Digital FA Senior Engineer.

Tamás Kerekes, President and CEO of NplusT:
We have a long-term collaboration with Peter, Sergio and the ST team. In the last period, we saw a significant increase in the challenges of implementing advanced failure analysis solutions, following the trend of the complexity of the automotive microcontroller products. Thanks to the work of Sergio, together with our Test Application Manager Alessandro Feriani, we’ve set up a new concept dedicated to PCM. This solution, created on top of our test platform and BarnieMAT data analysis software, is able to identify potential root causes of the failures through execution of specific electrical tests and measurements.

Peter Cini , STMicroelectronics ADG Digital FA Manager:
STMicroelectronics has collaborated with NplusT to develop embedded memory failure analysis diagnostic tools for Stellar MCUs, ST’s family of automotive microcontrollers for next-generation vehicles. Based on NplusT’s XINTscope and BarnieMAT platforms, the innovative tools provide a comprehensive diagnostic solution paired with a user-friendly and intuitive GUI that delivers efficient and effective failure analysis on our high-performance, highly sophisticated controllers.

NplusT MoCCA 2022 - STMicroelectronics Automotive Digital FA Team
MoCCA 2022 – STMicroelectronics Automotive Digital FA Team


January 27, 2023

NplusT was featured on the 68th issue of HiPEAC magazine with an article on the 2nd FTTE project POP-LEC, for the optimization of the power consumption of CPS/ IoT devices, developed in the SMART4ALL H2020 framework and currently in its advanced industrialization stage.

Tamás Kerekes, president and CEO of NplusT, explains how the the company teamed up with Hungarian design house PCB Design to build the equipment prototype.

The complete issue is available at this link.



October 13, 2022

NplusT is proud to announce the general availability of NanoCycler HS24, an upgraded version of the HS20. Using HS24, our partners are able to characterize the array performance, power consumption and interface timing of every NAND device at its highest operational speed, with full coverage of the ONFi 5.0 specification. HS24 is available for BGA132, BGA152 and BGA154 packages.

HS24 maintains all advanced features of the NanoCycler family: characterization in the full range of speed-temperature-voltage conditions, at extreme accuracy and flexibility. HS24 is software compatible with the HS16 and HS20 product versions.

 

 



July 1, 2022

NplusT participated at the HiPEAC 2022 conference, held in Budapest, Hungary, June 20-22.

Tamás Kerekes presented the paper “POP-LEC Power Optimization of Low Energy Computing Devices before Prototyping”, at the workshop “SMART4ALL – Capacity Building among European Stakeholders”. POP-LEC is a running project funded by the SMART4ALL program FTTE 2nd Call, the technology transfer targeting an innovative product which helps IoT developers to accelerate their time to market. The partner company in this technology transfer is PCB Design, Hungary. The presentation can be viewed at this link.

The conference offered also the possibility to present a poster related to the previously executed HS-CHAR project, supported by the TETRAMAX program.



June 7, 2022

NplusT announces it has been granted a new patent entitled “Sistema per la caratterizzazione di memorie non volatili” (“Non-volatile Memories Characterization System”).
The patented technology expands upon the company’s intellectual property rights relating to non-volatile memory testing and characterization and has been successfully integrated into the NanoCycler test system.

Thanks to its proprietary architecture, NanoCycler proves to be the leading solution for the industry’s most demanding NAND characterization needs, providing outstanding scalability (from single-socket development station until multiples of 84-socket racks), full, per-package independency for test execution and temperature control, cutting edge performance with data transfer up to 2.0GT/sec (2.4GT/sec coming soon) and an overall unmatched feature-rich hardware and software solution; to help SSD developers to increase lifetime and reliability of their products.



April 24, 2022

Low power consumption might be a mission-critical requirement in IoT applications. Early understanding of the power profile can accelerate time-to-market and reduce long and expensive iteration cycles. It is even more important considering that the power strongly depends not only on the electronic circuitry but on the device management algorithms as well.

POP-LEC (POwer Profiler for Low Energy Computing) aims at helping those developers who need to optimize their algorithms in order to reduce power consumption. It can be applied in the very early development stage, before the construction of the industrialized prototype. The POP-LEC environment provides a hardware and software platform where the algorithms to be validated can be executed, and integrates a high performance current profiling instrument.

“POP-LEC presents an exciting opportunity to enter a new market segment, merging our technology and knowledge of semiconductor testing with the technology transferred from our partner, PCB Design” – said Nicoletta Casini, CFO, coordinator of the POP-LEC project.

POP-LEC is being developed in the frame of the 2nd call of SMART4ALL FTTE (Focus Technology Transfer Experiment) with the collaboration of PCB Design.



April 4, 2022

The MOCCA 2021 has been assigned to the TenaFe NAND Characterization Team, lead by Curry Zhang & Sean Huang.
NplusT grants MOCCA (MOst Creative Customer Award) to users of NplusT products and services who leverage the most of the features and performance of such products making use of innovative approaches.

Tamas Kerekes, President and CEO of NplusT:
“I am really happy to see the level of understanding of the NAND, what Tenafe reached using NanoCycler. Curry with his team have developed a powerful infrastructure on top of the API provided with NanoCycler, and are using it efficiently to generate the necessary data and knowledge. This is the first time that MOCCA goes to China – I am extremely pleased about that, as I see a very fast evolution in technology and knowledge. The Chinese storage industry is evolving very fast, it is one of our strategic market targets: today we have several users of our products and technologies in China.

Curry Zhang, Senior Validation Manager of TenaFe:
“We’ve used NplusT NanoCycler for over 2 years, with the main purpose of NAND characterization, collecting data for our media management algorithm. As an SSD controller company, we need to adopt NAND from different vendors. Although we have our own controller and silicon, NanoCycler is still very helpful as a 3rd party tool. We use it frequently, every month, almost every week, for these reasons:

  • It has powerful NAND command API: we can development testsuites on top of; and it is flexible enough to support all kinds of NAND. When we get a new NAND, we only need 1 or 2 days to bring it up on NanoCycler, then we can start collecting the data we want;
  • It is very stable, we usually run it for weeks;
  • It has its own temperature control system, which is very impressive: we can easily and automatically control NAND temperature as whatever we want, for example erase and program in 30°C, read in 70°C, and we don’t even need to have a chamber to do so;
  • Within the last 2 years, we finished NAND characterization of more than 8 different NAND types from various vendors;
  • Last thing and most importantly, engineers of NplusT are nice and professional: we communicated a lot and they always gave us quick responses and an efficient support.”


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