Phison has announced the development of storage solutions and integrated circuits for PCIe Gen 5 SSDs. The new generation solid-state drives will be available in 2022, according to the manufacturer.
Phison Electronics is (along with Silicon Motion) the industry’s leading supplier of controllers for NAND flash products. If the largest producers of storage solutions such as Samsung and Western Digital have their own developments, there are dozens of other manufacturers and suppliers that use them, such as Kingston, Corsair, Crucial, Gigabyte, and many others.
Phison unveiled E26 controller for PCIe 5 SSDs for 2022
The announced Phison E26 platform will be the one to enable support for the PCIe 5 interface. As you know, it is a local Input/Output bus fundamental in today’s computer architecture, which is mostly used for graphics card communication and can also be used to connect network, sound, and of course storage components with modern SSDs.
Development of interface releases has slowed over schedule (PCIe 6.0 was planned for 2021), but Intel‘s announcement of PCIe 5.0 supports the Alder Lake platform.AMD will also do the same with the upcoming Ryzen.
PCIe Gen 5 SSDs: Better performance
The Phison E26 controller will support features such as RAID, error correction, and PCIe Dual Port and will have advanced features such as SR-IOV and ZNS. It will support the newest and fastest NAND interfaces such as ONFI 5.x and Toggle 5.x and will support different types of memories used in SSDs such as 3D TLC and QLC NAND and varying storage capacities, 16TB or higher.
Phison says it has already shipped test chips to its partners and expects custom products to be on sale in the second half of 2022, both for servers and data centers as well as in consumer client drives. These controllers are important because, along with NAND flash memory, they are the most important component of SSDs.
It should be noted that PCIe 5.0 will also support products over previous standards, in the same way, that today we can connect a PCIe 3.0 SSD in a 4.0 port.
