At CES 2021, Phison gave us the usual updates on their SSD controller roadmap. The most significant new products coming this year are a pair …
At CES 2021, Phison gave us the usual updates on their SSD controller roadmap. The most significant new products coming this year are a pair of USB flash drive controllers for high-end portable SSDs, designed to compete against current solutions that combine a USB to NVMe bridge chip with a standard NVMe SSD controller. Phison is also planning to introduce a new entry-level DRAMless NVMe SSD controller later this year. For portable SSDs, Phison is introducing the U17 and U18 controllers. The U17 uses a USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 (10Gb/s) host interface and a two-channel NAND interface running at up to 1200 MT/s. The U18 doubles these: USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20Gb/s) and a four-channel NAND interface. The performance specs may look lackluster compared to Phison’s NVMe SSD controllers, but they are pretty close to saturating what their respective USB host interfaces can handle, and performance will be competitive with NVMe+USB bridge based portable SSDs. However, the U17 and U18 will have a significant power efficiency advantage, lower cost and smaller PCB footprint than existing portable SSDs. Phison will also be providing TCG Opal encryption support on the U18, enabling a level of security they say is impossible to achieve with NVMe+USB bridge solutions. Phison expects to finish qualification of the U17 and U18 controllers later this month. We’re hoping to get a performance preview shortly thereafter by testing their reference designs, and retail products should be showing up within the next several months. For NVMe SSDs, the only new controller Phison is talking about this year is the E21T, their latest DRAMless NVMe controller.
