What you’ll learn:
- Features of the Flashtec NVMe 5016 PCIe Gen 5 SSD controller.
- Potential enterprise applications.
The AI boom and cloud services have accelerated the need for data centers with increased efficiency, power, and reliability. To meet those requirements, Microchip launched its Flashtec NVMe 5016 solid-state-drive (SSD) controller designed to provide higher bandwidth, security, and flexibility.
“Data-center technology must evolve to keep up with the significant advancements occurring in AI and machine learning (ML). Our fifth-generation Flashtec NVMe controller is designed to lead the market in fulfilling the increased need for high-performance, power-optimized SSDs,” said Pete Hazen, VP of Microchip’s data center solutions business unit. “The NVMe 5016 Flashtec PCIe controller can be deployed in data centers to facilitate effective and secure cloud computing and business-critical applications.”
The Flashtec NVMe 5016 16-channel controller is targeted at enterprise applications, including online transaction processing, financial data processing, database mining, and other applications. The controller also offers a sequential read performance of more than 14 GB per second, has a high random read performance of 3.5M I/Os per second, and provides more than 2.5 GB of data per watt. Technical features include:
- Up to 3.5 million random read IOPS on 4-kB operations.
- Bandwidths of more than 14 Gb/s.
- PCIe Gen 5 x4 or dual independent PCIe Gen 5 x2 (active, active/standby) host interface compliant with PCIe 5.0 base specification and NVMe 2.0+ protocol.
- Enables multiple form factors, including E3, U.2, U.3, and PCIe add-in cards.
- SLC, MLC, Enterprise MLC, TLC and QLC flash with toggle, and ONFI interface supporting up to 3200 MT/s.
- Zoned namespace (ZNS) capable.
- Supports flexible data placement (FDP).
- 16 independent flash channels.
- Supports up to four ranks of DDR5-5200.
- Industry-leading security and encryption, including PCIe lane encryption, single-chip hardware root of trust, and FIPS 140-3 Level 2 compliance.
- Data integrity and reliability (LDPC Flash ECC, Flash channel RAID, end-to-end data protection)
- Innovative ML technology.
- Advanced virtualization with multiple physical functions support.
As datasets become more expansive, security becomes a more pressing issue. Microchip looks to mitigate that concern by integrating security features into the NVMe 5016 controller to maintain integrity. These include secure boot with a hardware root of trust, dual signature authentication, support for various security standards via authentication algorithms, user data protection utilizing encryption for both data-in-transit (link level) and data-at-rest (media level), and sophisticated key management practices (FIPS 140-3 Level 2 and Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Opal standards).
To preserve data integrity, the controller offers overlapping end-to-end data protection with NVMe Protection Information (NVMe PI) and single error correction and double error detection (SECDED) ECC, along with advanced error correction via Adaptive LDPC. It also utilizes redundant array of independent disks (RAID) techniques to help protect against data loss.
The Flashtec NVMe 5016 PCIe Gen 5 SSD controller is currently being sampled for qualified customers.
