Flash Memory Summit 2018 - After ravaging the consumer SSD market for the last two years, Silicon Motion took the wraps off its first enterprise-focused controller.

The SM2270 will initially ship in enterprise SSDs from subsidiary Shannon Systems. SMI will likely have a number of additional design wins. Most of the companies we speak with on the consumer SSD side praise SMI for exceptional customer service and responsive field engineers that help bring products to market.

The SM2270 supports up to PCIe 3.0 x8 and started out as a design for add-in cards (AIC). Changes in market conditions pushed SMI to move the design to 2.5" products with dual-mode compatibility. We may see the SM2270 used in both AIC and 2.5" products.

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SMI supports current and emerging flash technologies including TLC, QLC and upcoming 96-layer flash. The company displayed the SM2270 with a wide variety of memory at Flash Memory Summit last week.

Compatibility

PCIe Gen 3 x8

NVMe 1.3

16 NAND Flash Channels

Three Dual-Core Arm Cortex R5 Processors

Intelligence

Power Loss Protection

6th Generation NANDXtend with Machine Learning Algorithms

End-to-End Data Path Protection

Open Channel Support

The SM2270 supports traditional on-drive flash translation layer or Open Channel technology that moves data management to the host system. This is the first controller from the company with Open Channel support.

SMI plans to swing for the fences in its freshman outing. At FMS 2018 we saw the reference design meeting and even exceeding the target performance range. The reference design targets up to 3,200 MB/s sequential read and 2,800 MB/s sequential write speeds. Random performance reaches up to 800,000 read and up to 200,000 write IOPS.