Phison Unveils PS5031-E31T SSD Platform For Lower-Power Mainstream PCIe 5 SSDs

At Computex 2023, Phison will unveil a new low-cost SSD controller for building mainstream PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Phison PS5031-E31T is a quad-channel DRAM-less controller for Solid State Drives, designed to provide sequential read/write speeds of up to 10,8 GB/s with drive capacities up to 8 TB. It features some of the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs available today.

The Phison E31T controller is at a high level a lower cost equivalent of Phison’s current high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD controller, the E26. The E31T is based on multiple Arm Cortex R5 cores for real-time operation and, traditionally in Phison’s design, comes with a dedicated accelerator belonging to the company’s CoXProcessor package.Chip supports Phison’s 7^th The generation LDPC engine with RAID ECC and 4K codewords handles the latest and upcoming 3D TLC and 3D QLC type 3D NAND. The controller also supports AES256, TCG Opal, and Pyrite encryption.

The SSD controller consists of 4 NAND channels with a total of 16 chip enable lines (CE), allowing for 4 NAND dies per channel. For now, Phison refrains from disclosing the NAND interface speeds supported by the controller, given the fact that the controller is configured to support sequential read/write throughput of 10,800 MB/s on four channels. Then it shows that the napkin calculation should support the transfer rate. At least 2700 MT/s. This is on the high end of his current ONFi/Toggle standard, but still easily achievable. For example, the latest 218-layer BICS 3D NAND devices from Kioxia and Western Digital support interface speeds of 3200 MT/s (which translates to peak sequential read/write speeds of 400 MB/s).

Phison says its E31T controller enables M.2-2280 SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and capacities up to 8 TB. Phison’s DRAM-less controllers tend to stay in SSD designs for the long haul because of their mainstream position and relatively cheap price, so it’s not surprising that Phison traditionally plans for the long term when it comes to capacity. I am choosing to 8 TB SSDs will eventually come down in price, even if they haven’t yet.

Compared to the high-end E26 controller, the E31T supports fewer NAND channels and fewer NAND dies overall, but enthusiasts will also want to take note of the manufacturing process Phison uses for its controller. Phison said he plans to build the E31T on TSMC’s 7nm process, which is no longer cutting edge, but is completely generation ahead of his 12nm process used in the E26. . So, combined with the reduced complexity of the controller, this should bode well for PCIe 5.0 SSDs that run cooler and consume less power.

Smaller mainstream chips should also lower the price of PCIe 5.0 SSDs. However, as always, it should be noted that Phison does not publicly discuss controller pricing, much less control how much customers (SSD vendors) charge for finished drives.

As for the availability of drives based on Phison’s new controller, Phison hasn’t announced a sample date yet, so we can’t expect E31T drives anytime soon. Phison typically launches new controllers fairly early in the SSD development process, so there’s usually a gap of at least a few months before his SSDs are complete and hit the market. As Phison’s second PCIe 5.0 controller, the E31T is expected to experience fewer issues than his E26 in the early days, but still expect his E31T drive to be his 2024 product. will be