Chinese startup Sage Microelectronics promises to cut the price of solid state disk technology in half with an SSD controller IC capable of packing up to 5TB on a single PCB with a standard 2.5-inch form factor. Sage Micro's SSD controller can address up to 5 TB of flash memory using a SATA II interface to drive 10 channels of SSD, MMC, or eMMC flash memory cards, with each channel supporting up to 512 GB of flash memory.

Sage's S68X multi-core SSD controller features a RISC CPU core managing the SATA bus and additional cores that handle two memory card channel interfaces each. The controller can support 4, 5, and 10 memory channels for less than $5 per controller.

Actuall a bunch of controllers control flash chips separately, that ought to give them a bit more bandwidth.

Sage Micro contracts with TSMC competitor SMIC to make its silicon, and said it can offer an SSD at $0.50 per gigabyte -- half the industry average.