Flash memory controller speeds enterprise storage

Integrated Device Technology won their Product of the Year Award in January for their enterprise flash memory controller, which is the industry’s first NVM Express device with native support for PCIe Gen 3. Their 89HF16P04AG3/89HF32P04AG3 chip will control SSDs that are over six times faster than current enterprise SATA 6G units. When SSD cards using this chip are out in a few months they may significantly speed storage in corporate computing environments.

We asked Mario Montana,  vice president and general manager of IDT's Enterprise Computing Division, about the origins of this IC. In 2008, IDT was exploring new markets and saw that some innovative customers were looking at connecting enterprise SSDs with a PCIe interface. Their technical and marketing team came up with product concepts that were presented to favorite OEMs for feedback. In parallel, they worked with other industry leaders to define a standard host control interface that gets the most out of PCIe SSDs, now known as NVMe.

 The Integrated Device Technology team in San Jose.

 Once reliable enterprise SSDs became available, they dramatically improved performance of I/O-intensive datacenter applications such as online transaction processing and data mining. But the legacy SATA/SAS host interface remained popular and was a major bottleneck. PCIe-based SSDs together with NVMe promise to solve the interface bottleneck. IDT saw the need for a single-chip enterprise flash controller with native PCIe Gen3 and standard NVMe.

IDT design teams in San Jose, New Jersey, and Milan jumped on the task. They found that while the product could lead the charge to standards-based NVMe SSDs, the flexibility and programmability provided did add to the complexity of the design. They worked with customers to implement features in the design and to decide on some that were left out. Close collaboration with customers was key to defining and building the right product with the right features.

Customer interest in this new chip has been very strong. In fact, IDT is limited in their ability to add additional customers and they are looking to grow their firmware/software team with talented engineers with enterprise SSD experience. This product appears to have nowhere to go but up.