Intel pretty much didn't design it. It wasn't worthwhile for them to invest in making a consumer-oriented NVMe SSD controller of their own. Instead, they used t

Intel pretty much didn't design it. It wasn't worthwhile for them to invest in making a consumer-oriented NVMe SSD controller of their own. Instead, they used the first NVMe SSD controller from Silicon Motion, whose SATA SSD controllers Intel had been using for a while. That SM2260 NVMe controller was cheap but bad, because it was made on a 40nm process (compared to 28nm or smaller for most NVMe controllers) and it was Silicon Motion's very first NVMe controller so they had lots of bugs.