NVM Express Enterprise Flash Controller Family from IDT Provides a Standard NVMe SSD Solution

IDT���s new flash memory controller family consists of two versions: 16-channel with PCIe x4 Gen 3 (89HF16P04AG3) and 32-channel with PCIe x8 Gen 3 (89HF32P08AG3). The flash controllers are designed to fully comply with the NVMe standard – a standard that defines an optimized register interface, command set, and feature set for PCIe SSDs. The goal of the standard is to help enable the broad adoption of PCIe-based SSDs, and to provide a scalable interface that realizes the performance potential of SSD technology now and into the future. This eliminates the need for OEMs to qualify multiple SSD drivers, facilitating the widespread use of PCIe SSDs and helping bring to market dramatic improvements in storage latency, throughput, power consumption and cost.

“As a founding member of the NVMe promoter group and developer of the world’s first PCIe enterprise flash controller announced last year, IDT is leading the charge in PCIe-based flash controller innovation,” said Kam Eshghi, senior director of marketing of the Enterprise Computing Division of IDT. “For many data center applications, NAND flash read and write speeds are exceeding the capabilities of legacy SAS/SATA interconnects. IDT has developed a family of NVMe-compliant PCIe flash controllers that dramatically boost the number of random I/O operations per second that a system can process, while concurrently reducing latency, power and cost by eliminating the traditional storage infrastructure. Early traction and other positive indicators suggest a rapid proliferation of this technology, and IDT is ready to support it.”

“NVM Express delivers a critical building block for the broad adoption of PCIe-based SSD solutions,” said Amber Huffman, senior principal engineer in the Storage Technologies Group at Intel and chairperson for the NVM Express Workgroup. “IDT is an early adopter and contributor to the PCIe and NVMe ecosystem. We’re pleased to see NVMe SSD controller products shipping from companies like IDT as part of a growing NVMe ecosystem enabling next-generation PCIe SSD designs.”

“The enterprise SSD market is expected to undergo tremendous growth, comprising approximately half of the total SSD market sales in 2012,” said Joseph Unsworth, research vice president at Gartner. “By 2015, we expect the PCIe enterprise controller market to more than quadruple to nearly 3.5 million units. Companies who can deliver fully functional high-performance controller solutions will be best positioned to penetrate the market opportunity.”

IDT’s PCIe flash controllers are sold to enterprise SSD developers who manufacture standards-based NVMe SSDs with PCIe Gen 3 or Gen 2 host interfaces. These SSDs are then used in enterprise-class centralized storage systems, server caching applications, and other systems requiring high-performance storage drives. End users deploy these PCIe SSD-based systems in their data centers for cloud computing and business-critical applications, such as online transaction processing, financial data processing, database mining and any other applications that are sensitive to storage performance.

In addition to fully supporting the PCIe Gen3 host interface for maximum throughput, IDT’s flash controllers are fully programmable, enabling customers to differentiate their solutions with custom firmware that leverages IDT’s reference firmware. Moreover, IDT’s product family is architected to maximize random storage I/O performance – a critical requirement driven by multi-core CPU designs and virtualization. The flash controllers also support enterprise-class features, including advanced encryption, data integrity and reliability features.

For performance demonstration of a PCIe-based SDD using IDT’s latest flash controllers, visit IDT at the Flash Memory Summit, August 21-23, in Santa Clara, California.

The IDT 89HF16P04AG3 and 89HF32P08AG3 are currently sampling to qualified customers and are available in a 27 x 27mm FCBGA and 40 x 40mm FCBGA, respectively.