2001–2007 The company was founded in September 2001 and its headquarters is in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The company also operates an advanced
R&D center based out of
Irvine,
California, United States. In 2002, the company began development of their
USB 2.0 to
SATA bridge controller technology. JMicron began developing SSD technology in 2006, launching their first generation SSD controller, the JMF601A/602A, towards the end of 2007. JMicron's
SSD controller was widely adopted by many SSD manufacturers such
ASUS,
Corsair,
OCZ, and
Transcend. JMicron was one of the first companies to provide an SSD controller chip to these companies, allowing them to produce reasonably priced SSDs. Unfortunately the SSD controller did not have any support for DRAM cache, and with the NAND technology available at the time this made random writes very slow (the JMF602B improved this only slightly).
2008 to present Also in 2008, JMicron showcased a number of peripheral products. This includes the JMB353, a hi-speed USB &
IEEE 1394a to SATA II external HDD controller chip; this device was the first to feature an integrated IEEE 1394a
PHY chip. Also included in the showcase is the JMB38x series, a
PCIe to
card reader & 1394 controller chip, the JMB211, a
Gigabit Ethernet PHY controller chip, the JMB352, a high-speed USB &
eSATA to 2-port SATA II external HDD controller chip, and the JMB325, a 1- to 5-port SATA II
port multiplier with hardware
RAID. In 2009, the JMF612 was released. It saw popularity throughout 2010 in its use in a number of industry SSDs. In particular, 2009 was a landmark year for JMicron, in that the company achieved the top ranking as a supplier for external HDD and SATA-PATA bridge controllers, shipping roughly 35 million and 15 million units, respectively. In 2010 stolen private keys certificates were used to digitally sign rootkit drivers in
Stuxnet virus. After developing its own physical layer and high speed technology over the preceding years because of flat growth in the long term, JMicron diversifies from the base notebook and motherboard controller business. 2011 is characterized by JMicron winning orders from
Western Digital and
Samsung Electronics for JMicron's
USB 3.0 HDD controller, with net sales projected to grow 10%. In late 2011, the JMF661 was released as a third generation JMicron SSD controller, and it was shown to be an effective entry-level product. Shortly thereafter, in 2013, the JMF667 series was released as a 256 GB capacity, 512 MB
DDR3 external cache SSD controller. Analysis in 2013 reveals that SSD controller technology and high-speed transmission interface IC accounts for 29% and 67% of JMicron's sales, respectively. Among these announcements included a single-chip, dual-port SATA III RAID/CLONE program within the JMS561/562/561U product line. Throughout 2014, JMicron's JMF667H was reviewed by a number of online review sites like
Tom's Hardware,
AnandTech, and
TweakTown. In June 2016, JMicron spun off its SSD division to
Maxiotek Corporation, a Taiwan-based company which designs and markets SSD controller products. Meanwhile, JMicron released the JMS576, its first
USB-C USB 3.1 Gen 1 to SATA 6 Gbit/s bridge controller. ==Products==