NVMe IP for Enterprise SSDs

Abstract

The NVM Express (NVMe) specification has been introduced in 2011. Five years later, it is definitely adopted as the new standard storage interface for Solid-State Drives (SSD). Even if SAS and SATA SSDs are still dominating the market (in unit shipment), the PCIe SSD market share is growing fast and will go over SAS and SATA.

Most of SSD manufacturers jumped into this new storage market with flash-based technology. A second wave of products will come in the near future, using a new generation of non-volatile memories, delivering impressive speed performances compared to NandFlash memories. The SSD manufacturers will have a to deal with low latency SSD controller design in order to benefit from the new NVM features, while keeping high reliability and low power consumption.

This white paper proposes a solution based on a full hardware NVMe implementation, describing its architecture, implementation and characterization.

Low Power NVMe architecture : 6pJ/bit

Based on an hardware –accelerated architecture, the IP-Maker NVMe IP does not require a multicore CPU running at hundreds of MHz in order to manage the NVM Express protocol. In addition, the architecture has been optimized in order to reduce the gate count, therefore lowering the power consumption.