As peripheral computing devices require ever more interconnection bandwidth, 2022 and 2023 are expected to be big years for adoption of the PCIe Gen 5 standard, which enables up to 128 Gbps over 16 channels and 32 Gigatransfers per second, doubling the capabilities of the previous PCIe Gen 4 standard.
Solid state drives (SSDs) are among the many peripherals that will benefit from PCIe 5.0 (PCIe standards for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), and with that in mind, Microchip Technology this week launched the PCIe Gen 5 NVMe 4016 SSD controller, which controls memory functions and other aspects of SSDs.
Part of the company’s Flashtec controller family, the NVMe 4016 addresses the market demand for SSDs delivering greater than 14 gbps per second throughput per link and more than 3 million input/output operations per second, Microchip said
The new controller, now sampling with customers, arrives as PCIe 5.0 products appear ready to hit the market seemingly on the heels of PCIe 4.0, which took several years to become market-relevant due to testing delays and other factors.
Samer Haija, associate director of product management, Data Center Solutions, Microchip Technology, told Fierce Electronics via email, “We see full support on the server for PCIe 5.0 in 2022, and expect PCIe Gen 5 SSDs to start deployment with end users in 2023 and ramp through the latter part of 2023 and into 2024. PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD’s will continue to be deployed for the next two years as they provide sufficient performance and capabilities for a wide variety of use cases. We also see customers upgrading to the latest technology not because they need PCIe Gen 5.0 per-se but to take advantage of new more efficient power, security features and higher density NAND to reduce costs.”
The NVMe 4016 supports the latest storage and performance compute applications, including Zoned Name Spaces and cloud Open Compute Platform, and enable future proofing for evolving non-volatile memory host controller specifications. Microchip also said the NVMe 4016 is also the first PCIe Gen 5 controller to introduce PCIe link encryption support, along with dual signature authentication and Trusted Platform support.
“We see a continued acceleration of adoption for NVMe SSDs to scale services efficiently and that scaling doesn’t just come from deploying more devices, but it can mean more virtual machines and processes are vying for the same resources on the SSD, as a result QoS continues to be an area of focus to make sure as performance scales the end devices can keep up and provide best response times,” Haija said. “Also, some NAND flash technologies continue to improve on response times (i.e. read latency) which means the SSD controller contribution to the overall latency needs to also improve so it is not the limiting factor in realizing improvements provided by the flash media.”
Microchip did not name customers or partners using the new controller, but Intel, AMD and Meta were among several companies quoted in Microchip’s press release in support of its product launch. Intel, for its part, already has demonstrated PCIe 5.0 capabilities with its Alder Lake system-on-a-chip hybrid architecture.
“Intel’s upcoming Next Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, code named Sapphire Rapids, will implement PCI Express 5.0 running at up to 32.0 GT/s [Gigatransfers per second] to deliver the low-latency and high-bandwidth I/O solutions our customers need to deploy,” said Debendra Das Sharma, senior fellow and chief architect, I/O Technologies and Standards, Intel, in the release. “We are pleased to see Microchip’s PCIe 5.0 Flashtec drive controller investment strengthen the ecosystem and drive broader deployment of PCIe 5.0 solutions.”
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