SSD controller targets power efficiency in data centers

Microchip Technology has introduced the Flashtec NVMe 5016 Solid State Drive (SSD) controller to address the increasing demand for powerful, efficient, and reliable data centers driven by the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud-based services. The 16-channel, PCIe Gen 5 NVM Express (NVMe) controller is designed to provide enhanced bandwidth, security, and flexibility.

The NVMe 5016 controller supports enterprise applications sensitive to latency and performance, such as online transaction processing, financial data processing, and database mining. It also caters to AI needs with improved throughput for large data sets used in model training and inference processing. The controller offers sequential read performance exceeding 14 GB per second and random read performance of 3.5M IOs per second, while maintaining a power-efficient profile of more than 2.5 GB of data per watt.

To support the latest Flash memory technologies, including Quad-Level Cell (QLC), Triple-Level Cell (TLC), and Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND, the NVMe 5016 controller incorporates strong Error Correction Code (ECC). It performs all Flash management operations on-chip, minimizing host processing and memory resource consumption.

The controller’s flexibility and scalability help reduce the total cost of ownership through advanced virtualization capabilities. It offers a programmable platform for developers planning to use Flexible Data Placement (FDP) in their SSDs, allowing control to optimize the performance, efficiency, and reliability of Flash resources.

As data storage expands, the NVMe 5016 controller is designed to provide enterprise-level security measures. These include Secure Boot with hardware Root-of-Trust, dual signature authentication, support for various security standards, user data protection with encryption, and key management practices adhering to Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3 Level 2 and Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Opal standards.

The controller features data integrity and reliability measures such as overlapping end-to-end data protection, advanced error correction, and failover recovery mechanisms using Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) techniques.

Microchip offers an ecosystem of development tools for the Flashtec NVMe 5016 PCIe Gen 5 SSD controller, including evaluation boards, a Software Development Kit (SDK), and the ChipLink tool for advanced debugging.