Phison is enabling valued customers with PCIe Gen5 SSD platforms that may be customised to perform optimally in their applications
Phison Electronics Corp., a provider of NAND flash controller integrated circuits and storage solutions, has announced its technology development of PCIe Gen5 customisable SSD solutions for Enterprise and Client SSDs.
Phison customers from Hyperscale Cloud Data Centres to PC Gaming demand the fastest performance motherboards and SSD storage devices. Their business models require that they transition to the newest technologies when they first become available, usually well before the rest of the software and hardware ecosystem has been established.
Phison is enabling valued customers with PCIe Gen5 SSD platforms that may be customised to perform optimally in their applications.
Customers who are early adopters of PCIe Gen5 SSDs will benefit from superior specifications and first to market leadership revenue. The data rate specification for PCIe Gen5 at 32Gb/s is twice the lane speed of PCIe Gen4 at 16Gb/s, enabling either double the overall performance, or offering similar performance, but using half as many lanes as PCIe Gen4.
Phison is actively developing its first PCIe Gen5 platform named the E26 Series Controller and SSD and has two key differentiating advantages. First, Phison makes more of the critical intellectual property (IP) blocks inside the controller than any other company, thereby eliminating dependencies and inconsistencies that competitors have when they source 3rd party IP for their controllers. Second, that the E26 controller IP is developed concurrently with Phison’s firmware in an FPGA environment, even before tape out ensuring a fast time to market with the highest reliability at introduction.
Phison will be providing early E26 Gen5 SSD samples to industry-leading motherboard manufacturers so their engineers can tune their electrical signal link-ups, command timing, and BIOS to Phison’s Gen5 SSD controllers and firmware. Phison’s E26 SSD platform will support PCIe Dual Port, and have advanced features such as SR-IOV and ZNS, and support for the newest, fastest NAND interfaces ONFI 5.x and Toggle 5.x.
“While PCIe Gen4 SSD shipments are still ramping up, there are many server and storage customers who will want to transition to PCIe Gen5 as soon as that technology is available,” said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Vice President at IDC. “By helping to enable an ecosystem, Phison’s customizable E26 SSD is at the forefront of PCIe Gen5 introductions and will facilitate data centre customers looking to benefit from the technology’s increased performance.”
Phison’s E26 SSD solution is designed to be a best-in-class combination of performance at low power using Phison’s unique architecture of low power consumption ARM R5 CPUs and an array of super low power but high-performance CoXProcessor 2.0 technology. The E26 is a customisable SSD platform that will be available in M.2, U.3, E1.S, and E3.S form factors.
The E26 Gen5 test chip has been successfully taped out in a 12nm advanced process, and customised SSD solutions are targeted to be shipping in the second half of 2022.
