Phison has the SSD controller PS 5018 – E 18 – briefly E 18 – introduced. With a connection of four PCI Express 4.0 lanes, it is intended for high-end SSDs that should achieve sequential transfer rates of 7.4 GB / s reading or 7.0 GB writing. With random access, the E 18 creates one million IOPS according to the manufacturer.

Third-party manufacturers such as Corsair, Gigabyte and Sabrent install Phison’s controllers on their M.2 cards. The first models with the E 18 are expected shortly – Sabrent has already announced a corresponding SSD with the Rocket 4 Plus.

Fastest PCIe 4.0 controller If SSDs with the E 18 – Controllers keep Phison’s performance promise, they would be the fastest on the market. Samsung’s SSD 980 Pro with a self-designed controller manages 7 GByte / s reading and 5 GByte / s writing, Western Digitals WD Black SN 850, also with its own controller, achieves 7 or 5.3 GByte / s. All manufacturers promise up to one million IOPS.

The first SSD generation with PCIe 4.0 connection largely relied on Phisons E 16 – Controller, which was an upgraded version of the predecessor E 12 with PCIe 3.0. With a maximum of 5 GByte / s and 750. 000 to a few 800. 000 IOPS are corresponding data carriers a lot slower than the new generation.

12 – nm technology from TSMC Phison lets the E 18 Manufacture of chip order-ready TSMC with structures of 12 nanometers – a clear jump compared to the 28 – nm-E 16 . Three ARM CPU cores (Cortex-R5) and a self-designed coprocessor supply NAND Flash with data via eight memory channels. DDR4-DRAM serves as a cache for the main memory.

The connection to the system is made via four PCIe 4.0 lanes. Manufacturers can combine the E 18 controller with up to 8 TB of NAND flash. Common encryption methods such as AES – 256 and SHA – 512 are on board.

(mma)