Introduction

If you’ve been following the SSD space at least a little bit, you definitely know Phison. Phison is the world’s leading NAND flash controller manufacturer, recognized for its cutting-edge solutions that drive the performance of solid-state drives in millions of systems. Based in Taiwan, Phison has been at the forefront of storage technology, providing high-quality controllers for almost all SSD vendors, except for those that have their own controllers, like Samsung, WD and Hynix.

We are excited to present an early look at the Phison E31, an engineering sample of their newest controller, which is set to power a wide range of upcoming SSDs from various vendors. As the second PCIe 5.0 controller introduced, the E31 is specifically designed for cost-efficient solutions, while the flagship E26 continues to cater to high-performance needs. Gen 5 SSDs have been on the market for a bit over a year, and virtually all drives came with a Phison controller—the E31. The problem—they are expensive and consume a lot of power, which means large heatsinks, many with an active cooling fan have to be used.

The E31 is designed to address that. It uses the 7 nm TSMC process, with a design focus on optimizing power. The controller is paired with Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND operating at 3600 MT/s. For cost reasons a DRAM cache chip is not included, but the controller will use up to 64 MB of main memory through the Host-Memory-Buffer (HMB) feature.

Phison E31 drives will be available in capacities of 1000 GB, 1024 GB, 2000 GB and 2048 GB. The endurance is set to 600 TBW and 1200 TBW.