MaHui Entrepreneur | TenaFe: Nailing the Chip Is Only 30% of Success

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Keep exploring, build great products, and success will follow.

#MaHui Entrepreneurs Resilient and Bold, Never Stop Exploring

In the era of big data, data propels human society forward. Yet beneath it all, the bedrock supporting continuous technological innovation is storage.

The solid-state drive, or SSD, is a hard drive built from arrays of solid-state electronic storage chips. The leap from hard disk drives to SSDs marked storage's first great leap forward. What once required a room full of servers could now fit in a box the size of a smartphone. Few realize that the explosive growth of mobile applications — e-commerce, mobile gaming, and more — owed much to this critical transition from hard drives to SSDs.

The second great transformation came as SSDs moved from enterprise applications into millions of homes. This technological shift allowed ordinary people to enjoy the benefits of storage innovation.

One startup's team was deeply involved in both transformations: TenaFe.

Nailing the Chip Is Only 30% of Success

TenaFe is headquartered in Beijing, founded by storage industry serial entrepreneur Mengkun "Mike" Li.

A solid-state drive consists mainly of memory chips, a controller chip, and a host interface. After decades of deep specialization in SSDs, TenaFe now primarily provides controller chip solutions. The firmware embedded in these controller chips handles host protocol processing, memory management, and automatic error correction and early warning.

In the controller chip space, PC OEM customers care about three things above all: performance, power efficiency, and stability.

Bringing a product into the PC OEM market typically takes months. Storage systems are extraordinarily complex — controller, firmware, host interface, flash interface — each layer contains countless details requiring exhaustive testing. The biggest pain point is how quickly you can find problems, reproduce them, and analyze them. That's the key to solving them.

TenaFe developed a proprietary intelligent R&D system unique in the industry, dramatically shortening PC OEM customer product certification cycles. This distinctive architecture ensures SSD products with high performance, low power consumption, low latency, and robust storage. Beyond that, TenaFe maintains an exceptionally rigorous validation process guaranteeing two million hours of trouble-free operation. The TenaFe TC2200 controller chip features a PCIe Gen 4 high-speed interface with read/write bandwidth of 4.8 GB/s.

Yet TenaFe didn't stop there. Instead, it embarked on an even more ambitious endeavor. Its next challenge: mass-producing an enterprise-grade PCIe Gen 5 controller chip. So far, everything is proceeding smoothly.

"Getting the chip right is only 30% of success. The remaining 70% is polishing the final product. That's where you spend the most money, the most people, the most time," said Chen Xiu, TenaFe's China General Manager. "That's why only one or two companies can actually pull this off. The talent requirements span too many domains, and it demands massive capital investment."

Keep Exploring, Keep Polishing the Product — That's How You Approach Success

Nothing tests a controller chip quite like gaming laptops. Gamers demand "blazing speed and fluidity" — high-performance hardware capable of handling enormous game data throughput.

Recently, Thunderobot unveiled a high-performance gaming laptop, the 911 Air, powered by TenaFe's Merak TC2200 SSD controller chip — a PCIe Gen 4 controller designed specifically for premium laptops.

When a solid-state drive runs under heavy load, excessive power draw or heat traditionally triggers throttling — capping performance at a controllable level to bring temperatures down, but at the cost of reduced performance. Gamers using high-end laptops play for extended sessions with demanding performance requirements, and their expectations for SSD performance and consistency keep rising.

Addressing the three demands of performance, power efficiency, and stability, TenaFe conducted extensive lab testing: over a hundred samples run continuously for two days in high-temperature, high-humidity conditions — all passing. Additional tests in extreme environments, including thermal cycling and power interruption, plus mechanical stress tests like red-dye penetration, drop, and vibration — the products held up without issue.

Relentless exploration. Relentless polishing. All so gamers can simply play better.

From China, For China

This year, the storage supply chain has been a rollercoaster. In the near term, a contamination incident at Kioxia and Western Digital's raw materials operation sent spot prices soaring early in the year. Then COVID outbreaks in mainland China, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the twin pressures of logistics and inflation dampened end-demand, weakening Q2 shipment momentum. Looking further out, the global enterprise shift toward digital transformation continues unabated. Data centers — the domain of high-margin, high-technology storage products — remain robust. Wafer capacity has moved from across-the-board shortages to a new normal of structural tightness. Within this landscape of peril and opportunity, domestic Chinese storage chip makers are brewing their next wave of growth.

TenaFe's vision is to keep innovating in storage, meeting society's ever-growing demand. As a chip company from China, for the world, one of TenaFe's aspirations is to give Chinese companies the best possible support — meeting China's own needs, solving these challenges on Chinese soil.

To address talent gaps, TenaFe continues investing wherever the world's best talent is concentrated, recruiting top people to strengthen its team and keep pace with customers' rapidly evolving demands. Its investment in mainland China is especially heavy. TenaFe's core team is now based primarily in mainland China, many of them veterans of the chip industry, serial entrepreneurs themselves.

"From day one, TenaFe's goal was to put down roots in mainland China. We've placed our best R&D resources and teams here, to give Chinese customers the best possible service," said Xiu.

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