IDT Introduces Industry’s First NVM Express Enterprise Flash Controller

Business Wire

Tuesday, August 21st 2012

IDT’s PCIe Gen3 Flash Controller Family Provides a Standard NVMe SSD Solution, Enabling Enterprise Storage and Server OEMs to Dramatically Improve Latency and Throughput Performance

Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT^®) (NASDAQ: IDTI), the Analog and Digital Company™ delivering essential mixed-signal semiconductor solutions, today announced the industry’s first NVM Express (NVMe) enterprise flash memory controller with native support for PCIe^® Gen 3. IDT’s NVMe flash controller family provides a standards-based solid-state drive (SSD) solution, enabling storage and server original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to overcome latency and throughput bottlenecks inherent to legacy SAS/SATA-based SSD designs.

IDT’s new flash memory controller family consists of two versions: 16-channel with PCIe x4 Gen 3 (89HF16P04AG3) and 32-channel with PCIe x8 Gen 3 (89HF32P08AG3). The flash controllers are designed to fully comply with the NVMe standard – a standard that defines an optimized register interface, command set, and feature set for PCIe SSDs. The goal of the standard is to help enable the broad adoption of PCIe-based SSDs, and to provide a scalable interface that realizes the performance potential of SSD technology now and into the future. This eliminates the need for OEMs to qualify multiple SSD drivers, facilitating the widespread use of PCIe SSDs and helping bring to market dramatic improvements in storage latency, throughput, power consumption and cost.

“As a founding member of the NVMe promoter group and developer of the world’s first PCIe enterprise flash controller announced last year, IDT is leading the charge in PCIe-based flash controller innovation,” said Kam Eshghi, senior director of marketing of the Enterprise Computing Division of IDT. “For many data center applications, NAND flash read and write speeds are exceeding the capabilities of legacy SAS/SATA interconnects. IDT has developed a family of NVMe-compliant PCIe flash controllers that dramatically boost the number of random I/O operations per second (IOPS) that a system can process, while concurrently reducing latency, power and cost by eliminating the traditional storage infrastructure. Early traction and other positive indicators suggest a rapid proliferation of this technology, and IDT is ready to support it.”