Silicon Motion's MonTitan PCIe 5.0 SSD controller
Silicon Motion's MonTitan PCIe 5.0 SSD controller
Silicon Motion has introduced its first SSD platform featuring a PCIe Gen5 interface – SMI's MonTitan SM8366 controller that offers a sequential performance of over 14GB/s. It also provides support for existing, specialty, and next-generation 3D NAND memory types, including 3D QLC NAND and even higher density flash. The platform is aimed at enterprise-grade applications, although some of its innovations may become a part of SMI’s consumer-oriented SSD controllers.
Silicon Motion’s MonTitan SM8366 is an NVMe 2.0a-compliant controller based on Arm core complexes. It features 16 NAND flash channels with a 2400 MT/s ONFI/Toggle interface to connect up to 128TB of 3D TLC, 3D QLC or XL-Flash memory. The controller supports DDR4-3200 and DDR5-4800 DRAM buffers with a dual-channel interface as well as a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface or dual independent x2/x2 or x1/x1 interfaces. SMI's MonTitan family also includes its SM8308 controller that has eight NAND channels and the same feature set as its higher-end counterpart.
According to SMI, SSDs based on the MonTitan SM8366 will be able to offer sustained sequential read performance of over 14 GB/s and sustained random read/write performance of 3 million/2.8 million 4K IOPS. The MonTitan SM8366 is a sophisticated platform that has a lot of features that support datacenter and enterprise SSD use cases. In particular, SSDs based on the SM8366 will support OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD requirements as well as the Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) specifications to handle up to 1024 queuing pairs, supporting up to 128 namespaces. In addition, the chip supports AES 256-bit encryption, attestation, hardware root of trust, Secure Boot, and TCG Opal.
The new enterprise-grade SM8366 controller from Silicon Motion supports a variety of memory types thanks to the company’s 5th Generation LDPC algorithms and extensions enabled by NANDCommand. SMI says that its platform can, work with Kioxia SSD 3D BiCS NAND and XL-Flash memory, the latest 176-layer 3D QLC NAND memory from Micron, and various types of 3D NAND chips from YMTC.
SMI’s MonTitan SSD platform featuring the SM8366 controller will be available to early engagement platforms in Q4 2022 as reference hardware design kits with licensable turnkey and layered firmware stacks to enable development of customer differentiated solutions. ACE Data Recovery team is looking forward to it.