Phison's solid-state drive and portable solid-state drive controller product series keep up with industry development trends, and the products exhibited at the 2024 U.S. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) are the best proof. Due to the continuous improvement of capacity and performance, portable solid-state drives of various forms and sizes (including SSD and USB flash drives) have gained a large market and market share.

In terms of energy efficiency, the rise of native flash memory controllers (such as Phison's U17/U18 and SiliconMotion's SM2320) plays a major role.

Since the launch of U17/U18 in 2021, USB4 has become popular on client platforms from Intel and AMD. SSD controller suppliers have also kept up with this update, and Phison officially became the first manufacturer to launch the U21USB4eSSD controller. (Note: On the controller side, the PSSD terminology promoted by SSD vendors appears to be being replaced by eSSD). Similar to U17/U18, these are single chip solutions. Small USB flash drives may also eventually come in multi-chip packages (with the flash memory and controller packaged together to save area).

Phison said the U21 controller can saturate the USB4 bus at speeds up to 4000MB/s. U21 is manufactured using TSMC's 12nm process and can support up to four channels and 16 chip enablers. Backwards compatibility is an important aspect. USB4 only requires compatibility with USB3.2Gen2, USB3.2Gen1 and USB2.0, however, U21 can also work in USB3.2Gen2x2 (20Gbps) mode if necessary. Phison customers can use the controller for PSSDs with capacities from 512GB to 8TB, available in both TLC and QLCNAND, supporting flash speeds of 1600MT/s.

This may reduce power consumption and energy efficiency to some extent, with higher flash speeds getting the job done faster and using less energy overall for a given workload. Higher flash speeds also save power by reducing the number of channels required for specific performance targets. It remains to be seen whether other eSSD controller vendors will support 2400MT/s flash memory later this year.

In terms of built-in SSD controller, Phison is also preparing to launch the E31TM Mainstream Gen5 controller this year. According to the naming rules, this is a DRAM-less controller suitable for mainstream M.22280SSD, focusing on low-power operation (suitable for mobile platforms). This four-channel controller is manufactured using TSMC's 7nm process and has peak performance of approximately 10,800MB/s (sequential workload) and 1.5 million IOPS (4K random access).

Support for TCGOpal/Pyrite ensures that the E31T platform can also be used with OEMSSD for enterprise deployments.

Phison also demonstrated the X2 enterprise SSD platform. This is a 5th generation x4 dual-port U.2 solution (also available in E3.S form factor) with steady-state sequential read performance of 14GBps and write performance of 12GB/s. The random read IOPS is 3M and the write IOPS is 0.8M.

Seagate uses Phison's X1 platform in the Nytro5050 series, and when the Nytro series gets updated, we'll likely see the X2 hit the market with different performance profiles/firmware tweaks.