Innogrit debuts with four NVMe SSD controllers

A new designer of SSD controllers is coming out of stealth mode today. Innogrit was founded in 2016 by veterans of the storage industry with the goal of developing a storage technology supporting applications for artificial intelligence and large data. We talked with co-founder Dr. Zining Wu (formerly CTO of Marvell) about the company's planned product line. He will present more information next week in a keynote address at the Flash Memory Summit.

Innogrit's long-term goal is to tackle the enterprise storage market, but they start modestly with a DRAM-free client SSD controller, the IG5208 "Shasta". This is already in mbad production with turnkey reference SSD designs available. Increasingly large controllers will then be tracked with more advanced feature sets: Shasta +, Rainier and Tacoma. At each iteration, Innogrit increases performance, adds new features, and improves its LDPC error-correcting engine.

The Shasta and Shasta + controllers both primarily target the customer SSD market and are designed as low-cost conventional solutions. Shasta has only two PCIe 3 channels while Shasta + has four and therefore a superior performance, but otherwise, they are quite similar. Both are 28 nm models and use the NVMe host buffer feature instead of including DRAM controllers. Both controllers are small enough to be integrated with single-chip BGA SSDs. Innogrit reference designs for Shasta-based SSDs include standard 11.5x13mm and 16x20mm BGA SSD fingerprints and a CFX card design. Shasta +'s enhanced ECC capabilities will make it a better choice for QLC-based SSDs, but both controllers support QLC's full range of SLCs from multiple manufacturers.

Because Shasta and Shasta + are stepping stones into the enterprise and data center markets, they support some of the features that are not typically found on client SSDs, such as channel-based SSD operation. open. End-to-end data path protection is included, with ECC on all SRAM buffers on the controller and on data stored in the host memory buffer. Appropriate power management for the customer and integrated use is supported, Shasta reaching a peak at 0.9 W and supporting idle states at 55 mW and below 1 mW, while Shasta + reaching a maximum of 1.35W. The NVMe boot partition feature is also supported for embedded systems that do not include a separate boot ROM device.

The Innogrit Rainier Controller represents a significant generational breakthrough compared to the Shasta family, leveraging the high-end customer and entry-level data center markets. Rainier is moving to one of TSMC's FinFET 16/12 nm processes, which Innogrit (and most controller designers) consider as necessary to support PCIe gen4 with reasonable power consumption. Rainier has 8 NAND channels up to 1200MT / s, quite fast for any NAND currently available. This allows sequential read and write speeds of up to 7GB / s and 6.1GB / s, respectively, more or less saturating the PCIe 4×4 interface. Rainier adds enterprise features, such as multiple namespace support and SR-IOV virtualization, but customer-facing power management is still supported, with state-of-the-art features. 39, inactivity of 50 mW and less than 2 mW.

The most powerful controller on the Innogrit roadmap is Tacoma, which relies on Rainier by doubling the number of NAND channels to 16 (carrying the maximum capacity supported at 32 TB), expanding the 72-bit DRAM interface (64b with ECC) and increasing -end features. Sequential I / O performance will be about the same as Rainier's, but random I / O is boosted by additional parallelism. Virtualization features have been improved over Rainier, and the NVMe controller buffer feature is supported, which is useful for NVMe over Fabrics deployments. A special low-latency mode is introduced, which Innogrit will present with Toshiba's XL-FLASH (their response to Samsung's Z-NAND). Perhaps the most important feature of Tacoma is the addition of storage computation with a deep learning accelerator; More information about it will be shared next week at the Innogrit's main presentation at the Flash Memory Summit.

The Innogrit business model will be similar to that of most other independent SSD controller vendors, providing SSD vendors with a range of options ranging from basic SDK for custom firmware to key designs. in hand of SSD. They have won several design awards with Shasta family controllers and are already sampling Rainier and Tacoma controllers.