Memory and storage

There is always a lot of activity in the area of memory and storage. Makes you wonder when it will slow down or end. No end in sight at this time. Here are a few of the interesting new products I have seen recently.

PMC (http://pmcs.com/) released its new Flashtec NVRAM drives at the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. The drives are a PCI-Express 3.0 solution with DRAM backed up by flash and using an advanced NVMe controller. The drives are said to yield over 10 million IOPS and sub-microsecond latency. Available sometime in the fourth quarter, they offer 4-, 8- or 16-Gbyte capacities.

PMC 16-Gbyte Flashtec NVRAM drive

The 16-Gbyte version (NV1616) has an x8 lane interface in a low-profile MD2 PCIe card form factor. It combines DRAM performance with NAND persistence to provide mission-critical applications the necessary safety net for data. The card's flash-based backup unit protects the DRAM content in the event of a power failure. A fast backup and recovery cycle ensures that mission-critical applications will have a short recovery time across power failure events. And eliminating a UPS frees up rack space and reduces support and maintenance cost without compromising critical system data across power failures. I could not get any price information at this time. Stay tuned.

Seagate (www.seagate.com) says it is shipping an 8-Tbyte 3.5-in. hard-disk drive. However, the company provided no model number and no detailed information on its new product, so we will wait to hear more.

Smart Modular Technologies (www.smartm.com) has announced its next-generation DDR4 NVDIMMs. Offering nonvolatile memory functionality with DRAM speed, this memory solution is designed for improved performance and data integrity in server environments. SMART's proprietary SafeStor technology is the engine which initiates backup and restore operations upon command from the host controller. It functions as a JEDEC standard DDR4 RDIMM during normal operation and fits a JEDEC-standard 288-pin DIMM form factor.  I have no further information on this product.

In a research demonstration at the Flash Memory Summit, HGST (http://www.hgst.com), a part of Western Digital, showed off a super-fast SSD. It has a PCIe interface and is said to offer 3 million random read I/Os per second of 512 bytes each when operating in a queued environment and a random read access latency of 1.5 µs in nonqueued settings.

This SSD uses Phase Change Memory (PCM). PCM is one of several new classes of high-density, nonvolatile memories that exhibit dramatically faster read access times when compared to NAND Flash memory. HGST used 45-nm 1-Gbit PCM chips to build a prototype full-height, full-length PCIe Gen 2×4 SSD card. No word of production, but it is likely to be a few years away.

The U8 industrial USB flash memory controller

Hyperstone (http://www.hyperstone.com) has introduced its new U8 industrial USB flash memory controller IC. It is fully compliant to USB 2.0 Hi-Speed and Full-Speed and mass storage device class and has an ECC engine correcting up to 96 bits. Its flash interface is compliant with Toggle DDR and ONFI 2.3, and it features an on-the-fly AES encryption hardware engine, along with additional SPI, I² C, and ISO7816 (smartcard IC) interfaces. The U8 will be available as probed die or in a QFN-76 package. Samples are available now.