Phison’s next-gen PCIe 4.0 SSD Controller Coming in 2020 with Speeds up to 7GB/s

Phison Updates PCIe 4.0 Portfolio at Flash Memory Summit

Phison has revealed “the next generation of E16” at this year’s Flash Memory Summit, and the improvements are not subtle. Not only does the upcoming PS5018-E18 controller offer significantly higher speeds than the currently available E16 controller, but it promises to consume significantly less power (and produce far less heat).

The specs (available here) are impressive:

Phison PS5018-E18 Controller
Interface	PCI Express 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.4
Capacity	Up to 8TB
NAND	Up to 8 Channels Up to 32 CEs 1200 MT/s per channel DDR4/LPDDR4 DRAM
Performance (Max)	7000 MB/s seq. write/read 1000K IOPS random read/write
Processor	32-bit ARM Cortex R5 (3 CPUs) CoXProcessor Technology
Process Technology	12nm TSMC
Power	3.0W
Peripheral Interface	GPIO, UART, ICE, I2C, SPI, SMBus
Data Reliability	4th Gen LDPC engine End-To-End Data Path Protection SmartECC
SRAM Protection	Internal SRAM ECC/parity protection
Security	HW: AES 128/256 bit, SHA 160/256/512, RSA 4096 FW: TCG & Opal 2.0, Pyrite, Sanitize and Crypto Erase
Temperature	Controller: -40 ~ 125C (Tj)
Other	Dynamic SLC cache support 4KB & 512B support

The PS5018-E18 will be available Q2 2020, but this was not the only product under discussion; the PS5019-E19T is coming in Q4 2019, and this sits in the middle of the current/upcoming Phison PCIe Gen4 portfolio (including the existing E16) from Phison:

• PS5016-E16 – a high-end controller that can easily reach speeds of 5GB/s sequential reads and 4.4GB/s sequential writes – the fastest sequential reads and writes for a single M.2 SSD
• PS5019-E19T – offering low power controllers for mainstream drives, delivering best-in-class power savings and reducing cooling needs in data centers for all-day computing (Available 4Q 2019)
• PS5018-E18 – builds on the success of E16 to deliver even higher levels of performance with speeds of 7GB/s reads and writes (Available 2Q 2020) in advanced 12nm process node.