This afternoon LSI Corporation announced that it is acquiring SandForce for $400 million in cash and assumed options.
We are excited for the team at SandForce and proud to have been a part of building a company that is helping to usher in a new era of storage. SandForce delivers solid state disk (SSD) processors that power volume flash memory in both high-end storage as well as consumer applications. The primary advantages of flash memory are that it is much faster, more reliable and consumes less energy than hard disk drives. Many of our limited partners and investors that have looked at investing at SandForce over the years will likely remember us saying that flash memory is the most disruptive force in storage since the floppy disk drive. We truly believed that when we made the decision to invest in 2006 as we saw the use of flash becoming more ubiquitous in devices like the iPod. We believed that as more consumer devices took advantage of flash, the price of flash would decrease and its uses in enterprise applications would increase. As the price of flash per GB came closer to hard disk drives, more applications would take advantage of all it had to offer including dramatically faster performance.
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