Netlist Inc Company Profile

We provide high-performance modular memory subsystems to customers in diverse industries that require enterprise and storage class memory solutions to empower critical business decisions. We have a history of introducing disruptive new products, such as one of the first load reduced dual in-line memory modules ("LRDIMM") based on our distributed buffer architecture, which has been adopted by the industry for DDR4 LRDIMM. We were also one of the first to bring NAND flash memory ("NAND flash") to the memory channel with our NVvault non-volatile dual in-line memory modules ("NVDIMM") using software-intensive controllers and merging dynamic random access memory integrated circuits (“DRAM ICs” or "DRAM") and NAND flash to solve data bottleneck and data retention challenges encountered in high-performance computing environments. We recently introduced a new generation of storage class memory products called HybriDIMM to address the growing need for real-time analytics in Big Data applications, in-memory databases, high performance computing and advanced data storage solutions. We also resell NAND flash, DRAM products and other component products to end-customers that are not reached in the distribution models of the component manufacturers, including storage customers, appliance customers, system builders and cloud and datacenter customers.

Due to the ground-breaking product development of our engineering teams, we have built a robust portfolio of over 100 issued and pending U.S. and foreign patents, many seminal, in the areas of hybrid memory, storage class memory, rank multiplication and load reduction. Since our inception, we have dedicated substantial resources to the development, protection and enforcement of technology innovations we believe are essential to our business. Our early pioneering work in these areas has been broadly adopted in industry-standard registered dual in-line memory modules (“RDIMM”), LRDIMM and NVDIMM. Our objective is to continue to innovate in our field and invest further in our intellectual property portfolio, with the goal of monetizing our intellectual property through a combination of product sales and licensing, royalty or other revenue-producing arrangements, which may result from joint development or similar partnerships or defense of our patents through enforcement actions against parties we believe are infringing them.

The global high-performance memory module market is driven by increasing demand from data center and enterprise storage applications for improved input/output performance, lower latency and data retention capabilities in the event of unexpected system failure. Global data center IP traffic is expected to reach 163 zettabytes of data in 2025, up from 16.1 zettabytes in 2016, according to International Data Corporation. The proliferation of mobile devices, social media platforms, cognitive/artificial intelligence systems and cloud-based software applications is resulting in the creation of unprecedented amounts of unstructured data. In order to manage and analyze this data, we believe new computing and memory architectures need to be developed to satisfy the needs in the industry.

In high-performance computing environments, such as cloud-based computing and Big Data applications, a systems overall processing speed is limited to the ability of the central processing unit ("CPU") to access data cached in memory. Memory speeds have failed to keep pace with improvements in CPU processing speeds, resulting in buffering delays encountered in highly intensive computing environments. To mitigate challenges arising from differences in CPU and memory clock speeds, data center operators have increased the number of servers in their facilities as well as the memory content in each server. Memory capacity is expanded through the use of DIMMs, generally incorporating up to 16 GB of DRAM per module with today’s technology and moving up to 64/128 GB of DRAM per module and beyond. Our technology enables an intelligent controller to be integrated onto the DIMM, in order to manage the rapid flow of data between the CPU and memory. The number of DIMMs incorporated into a server increases in correlation with the number of processing cores in the CPU. DDR4 DIMMs incorporate our load-reduction technology to mitigate the trade-off between operating speed and memory capacity inherent in prior generations of server DIMM. These load-reduced DIMMs, or LRDIMMs, are now the pre-dominant memory technology used in high-capacity servers and high-performance computing clusters.

Our commercially available memory subsystem products and other products that we sell include:

Component and Other Product Resales

In addition to our own products, we resell certain component products that we purchase for the purpose of resale. We have purchased certain of these products, including NAND flash and DRAM products, from Samsung under the terms of the JDLA. We have also sourced these products from other suppliers to the extent sufficient product is not available from Samsung to meet customer demand or in the event of other Samsung supply issues. In 2017 and 2016, resales of these products represented approximately 85% and 66% of our net product revenues, respectively. Additionally, we sell excess component inventory to distributors and other users of memory integrated circuits.

Storage Class Memory

Using an industry standard DDR4 LRDIMM interface, we believe HybriDIMM is the industry’s first storage class memory product capable of operating in existing Intel/AMD x86 servers without BIOS and hardware changes. HybriDIMM unifies DRAM and NAND flash in a plug-and-play module, delivering terabyte storage capacities operating at DRAM-like nanosecond memory speeds. HybriDIMM’s architecture combines an on-DIMM co-processor with our software-defined data management algorithm. HybriDIMM’s feature-set encompasses the NVDIMM functionalities adopted by the industry. HybriDIMM dramatically improves application performance by reducing data access latency by up to 1,000 times versus the fastest existing storage solution known to us, and provides up to an 80% cost reduction compared to the highest existing memory density for in-memory applications known to us.

We publicly demonstrated a HybriDIMM prototype in August 2016 and we sampled HybriDIMM to select customers in the second half of 2017, and we are now working with certain customers to transition to volume production.

Nonvolatile Memory

Our Vault product line enables customers to accelerate data running through their servers and storage and reliably protect enterprise-level cache, metadata and log data by providing near instantaneous recovery in the event of a system failure or power outage. Our nonvolatile memory offering includes:

EXPRESSvault PCIe (EV3). EV3 is a plug-and-play memory card for server appliances which provides data acceleration and data protection. It is compatible with industry standard PCIe 3.0 x8 lane slots, eliminating the need for proprietary hardware and extra motherboard space. EXPRESSvault ships with Linux and Windows drivers compatible with standard PCIe peripheral command sets.

NVvault DDR3 NVDIMM (NV3). NV3 provides data acceleration and data protection in a Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (“JEDEC”) standard DD3 interface for integration into industry-standard server and storage solutions. NV3 incorporates our patented Vault cache-to-flash controller in conjunction with general purpose CPUs, redundant array of independent disks (“RAID”) adapters and other devices.

NVvault DDR4 NVDIMM (NV4). NV4 relies on the NVDIMM-N interface specification to provide data acceleration and data protection in a JEDEC standard DDR4 interface. We have demonstrated NV4 to deliver a 200% performance improvement in transaction-based workloads compared to PCIe NAND devices.

Specialty DIMMs and Embedded Flash

A small portion of our net product revenues is from OEM sales of specialty memory modules and flash-based products, the majority of which are utilized in data center and industrial applications. When developing custom modules for an OEM system launch, we engage with our OEM customers from the earliest stages of new product development definition, providing us valuable insight into their full range of system architecture and performance requirements. This close collaboration has also allowed us to develop a significant level of systems expertise. We leverage a portfolio of proprietary technologies and design techniques, including efficient planar design, alternative packaging techniques and custom semiconductor logic, to deliver memory subsystems with persistence, high density, small form factor, high signal integrity, attractive thermal characteristics, reduced power consumption and low cost per bit.