Intel is about to bring PCI Express 5.0 into consumer homes with the launch of Alder Lake and its accompanying Z690 chipset. Keeping up with the trend Phison has announced its first controller platform featuring a PCIe Gen 5 interface with a 32 GT/s data transfer rate per lane.
Phison’s E26 controller will be based around Arm Cortex-R5 cores that will be accompanied by special-purpose accelerators that belong to the company’s CoXProcessor 2.0 package. The controller will support all modern and upcoming types of 3D NAND memory featuring ONFI 5.x and Toggle 5.x interfaces at up to 2400 MT/s data transfer speeds. Since this is an enterprise package Phison’s E26 will also support PCIe Dual Port connectivity for U.3 drives, single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), and zone namespaces (ZNS) functionality.
Considering PCIe Gen5 is an expensive solution, the main target demographics will be the Enterprise market. However, the E26 will be flexible enough to offer solutions through M.2 drives for client PCs as well as entry-level servers, U.3 drives for mission-critical and high-availability machines, and E1.S/E3.S for high-density all-flash storage arrays.
The Phison E26 controllers are made on 12 nm-class process technology and the company will start sampling soon to the motherboard manufacturers alongside developing the firmware.
As always, stay tuned to TechARX for all the updates!
