Fabless start-up in custom chip design eASIC Corp. announced a strategic investment by Seagate Technology LLC. In addition to the equity investment, eASIC and Seagate also are exploring opportunities to jointly develop custom silicon solutions for Seagate's portfolio of SSD.

As flash memory continues to evolve at a rapid pace from 2 bits per cell, 1xnm (MLC) to 3 bits per cell 1xnm (TLC) and the industry continues to adopt a variety of host interfaces such as PCIe, NVMe and SoP (SCSI over PCIe), Seagate and eASIC seek to deliver low-cost and low-power SSD solutions for the consumer, enterprise and cloud computing.

"eASIC has demonstrated innovative custom silicon technology with our industry-leading solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs)", said Rocky Pimentel, chief sales and marketing officer, Seagate."eASIC's ability to quickly develop custom differentiated solutions while meeting stringent cost, power and performance requirements will enable us to rapidly deliver storage solutions and improve our product position in both SSD and SSHDs."

eASIC is a fabless semiconductor company offering new ASIC devices aimed at reducing the overall cost and time-to-production of customized semiconductor devices. Low-cost, high-performance and fast-turn ASIC and SoC designs are enabled through patented technology utilizing Via-layer customizable routing. This fabric allows eASIC to offer a new generation of ASICs with lower up-front costs than traditional ASICs.