Phison PCIe Gen5 Customizable SSD Solutions to Ship in 2022
Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller integrated circuits and storage solutions, today announced its technology development of PCIe Gen5 customizable SSD solutions for Enterprise and Client SSDs.
Phison customers from Hyperscale Cloud Data Centers to PC Gaming demand the fastest performance motherboards and SSD storage devices. Their business models require that the 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 our valued customers with Phison PCIe Gen5 SSD platforms that may be customized to perform optimally in their applications.
Phison PCIe Gen5 Benefits and Improvements
Customers who are early adopters of Phison 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 E26 Series Controller for Gen5 SSD
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 a 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. By helping to enable an ecosystem, Phison’s customizable E26 SSD is at the forefront of PCIe Gen5 introductions and will facilitate data center customers looking to benefit from the technology’s increased performance.”
Jeff Janukowicz, Research Vice President at IDC.
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 customizable SSD platform that will be available in M.2, U.3, E1.S, and E3.S form factors.
The Phison E26 Gen5 test chip has been successfully taped out in a 12nm advanced process, and customized SSD solutions are targeted to be shipping in the second half of 2022.
