Hynix buys SSD controller manufacturer

The South Korean memory manufacturer Hynix has acquired the American company Link-A-Media Devices. That company has been making controllers for hard drives and business storage devices based on flash memory for years.

Recently, Link-A-Media Devices, better known as LAMD, has been making controllers for consumer SSDs. The first solid state drives with a LAMD controller, the Neutron series SSDs, were released by Corsair in early June. The company was founded in 2004 and produces hard disk controllers and SSD controllers for enterprise drives. The companies did not disclose the amount involved in the acquisition.

Hynix is ​​the world’s largest producer of memory after Samsung and is slightly lower in the ranking for flash memory. The company has announced take over the controller manufacturer in order to be able to supply not only semi-finished products such as memory chips, but also complete products such as SSDs, memory cards and USB storage devices. The margins of these are a lot higher than those of the bare chips; the prices of dram chips in particular have been under heavy pressure for some time.