Phison
Phison Electronics Corporation is a Taiwanese public electronics company that primarily designs, manufactures and sells controllers for NAND flash memory chips. These are integrated into flash-based products such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and solid-state drives (SSDs). Some Sony MicroVault USB sticks and Verbatim Store 'n' Go USB sticks use Phison USB-to-Flash micro-controller ICs. Phison claims to have produced the earliest USB flash removable disk, dubbed "Pen Drive." Phison is a member of the Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group (ONFI), which aims to standardize the hardware interface to NAND flash chips. History . Phison was founded in 2004 by Datuk Pua Khein Seng and four others. In early October 2014, security researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson publicly released source code to a firmware attack against Phison USB controller ICs. This code implements the BadUSB exploit described in July 2014 at the Black Hat Briefings conference. In August 2019, Phison announced that they would be releasing PS-50 series chips, e.g., PS5018-E18, that are designed to support PCIe 4.0 NVMe Solid State Drives. With such technology, the chips built on the NVMe SSDs have read and write speed of up to 7,000 MBs  per second. In late 2020, Phison started shipping their E18 for high-end NVMe SSDs. In January 2021, Phison announced that they are planning to introduce a pair of USB flash drive controllers for high-end portable SSDs, designed to compete against current solutions that combine a USB to NVMe bridge chip with a standard NVMe SSD controller. Phison is also planning to release a new entry-level DRAMless NVMe SSD controller later in 2021. For portable SSDs, Phison is introducing the U17 and U18 controllers. For NVMe SSDs, the only new controller Phison is planning to introduce in 2021  is the E21T, their latest DRAMless NVMe controller. This is a follow-up to the E19T controller, which has seen very little use in retail consumer SSDs but has actually been outselling their high-end E16 PCIe 4.0 controller due to strong demand from OEMs. In January 2022, Phison introduced the E26 SSD controller, with higher transfer speeds than previous controllers. In April 2022, Phison announced a longterm partnership with data storage company Seagate to develop and distribute enterprise NVMe (non-volatile memory express) SSDs.