PCI Express® Flash Controllers

Solid-state drives promise to greatly enhance enterprise storage performance with faster random access to data and faster transfer rates. However, NAND flash read and write speeds are exceeding the capabilities of legacy SAS/SATA host interconnects. PCI Express® (PCIe)-based SSDs together with the NVM Express (NVMe) host control interface standard address this interface bottleneck. IDT’s family of NVMe compliant PCIe enterprise flash controllers dramatically boost the number of random I/O operations per second (IOPS) that a system can process, while concurrently reducing latency and power by eliminating the traditional storage infrastructure.

IDT’s PCIe flash controllers are sold to enterprise SSD developers who manufacture standards-based NVMe SSDs with PCIe Gen 3 or Gen 2 host interfaces. These SSDs are then used in enterprise-class centralized storage systems, server caching applications, and other systems requiring high-performance storage drives. End users deploy these PCIe SSD-based systems in their data centers for cloud computing and business-critical applications, such as online transaction processing, financial data processing, database mining and any other applications that are sensitive to storage performance.   

Benefits

• Dramatically improve latency and throughput performance
• Use standard NVMe drivers that simplifies OEM qualification
• Add “secret sauce” IP and differentiate with own firmware

 
IDF Conference Video Interview with Kam Eshghi (Sept. 2012)
Engineering TV - NVMe Express Simplify PCIe and Flash Integration  

Articles
EE Times - NVMe powers SSDs in the enterprise
Electronic Design: Innovations Push Processors And Storage Into New Digital Roles
SSD Review - IDT Shows Off The First NVMe PCIe SSD Processor and Reference Design
Electronic Design - Controllers Speed NVM Express Drive Delivery

Video: PCIe NVMe Flash Controllers