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Silicon Motion Technology Corporation, a world leader in design and production of NAND Flash controllers for solid-state storage devices, is announcing its new SM2246EN SSD controller for client solid-state drives (SSDs) and NAND-cache SSD products. Sampling is underway of the ultra high-performance and low power consumption SM2246EN SATA revision 3.1 (6 Gb/s) SSD controller.
Independent testing results confirm that the SM2246EN’s performance and power consumption specifications place it right alongside the top SSD controllers on the market today. In recent years, those SSD producers who do not supply their own NAND controller have usually chosen between the “Big Two” — LSI SandForce or Marvell. Enter the Silicon Motion SM2246EN and immediate competition for the big-name players in the SSD controller arena.
The SM2246EN supports MLC, TLC, and SLC NAND Flash from all of the major NAND producers. Extremely flexible firmware options allow for a broad range of customization and configurations. This complete hardware and firmware SSD controller solution makes the SM2246EN an industry leader in capabilities and incorporated technologies.
According to Wallace Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion, “We are excited to introduce SM2246EN, an innovative 4-channel SSD controller with tight cooperation between its hardware architecture and firmware management, delivering even higher performance than most 8-channel SSD controllers in the market. Our customers are impressed by SM2246EN’s superior read/write rates as well as ultra-low power consumption, making it the ideal solution for high-performance, power efficient devices including PCs, Ultrabooks, tablets and industrial SSDs.”
“Combined with our industry-leading proprietary configurable ECC technology and comprehensive global customer support, the SM2246EN is a complete hardware and firmware controller solution that enables better endurance, higher reliability and more consistent performance throughout the lifecycle of the SSD.”
The SM2246EN achieves sequential read/write performance of up to 540 MB/s and 410 MB/s, respectively. It also delivers up to 80,000 random read IOPS and 75,000 random write IOPS. At a mere 60 mW average power consumption, the SM2246EN comes in 25% below Intel’s 2014 Ultrabook guidelines (with MobileMark ’12) for device power target. Wear-leveling firmware and advanced ECC management increase reliability and performance.
The SM2246EN is able to support the latest 1X nm / 1Y nm architecture MLC / TLC Flash, helping create more affordable, higher-capacity SSDs. It also supports high toggle, ONFI and asynchronous NAND. Security protocols include AES 128/256 encryption, Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and Opal full-drive encryption compliance. The SM2246EN’s flexibility and broad compatibility also make it ideal for commercial and industrial-grade usage scenarios.
Michael Yang, Senior Principal Analyst for Memory & Storage at IHS, observes that “The SSD market is expected to grow at 35% CAGR to over 100 million units per year by 2017. Based on our testing, SMI’s SM2246EN SSD controller exhibits very competitive performance against leading SSDs on the market. The availability of new merchant controllers such as SM2246EN as a viable alternative will help expand the overall SSD market.”
Healthy competition is always good for the marketplace, and the SSD industry continues to be a prime example of this. Consumers and end-users are the ultimate winners when competition keeps performance ever-increasing, power consumption ever-decreasing, and prices more competitive.
Silicon Motion has the SM2246EN currently in the sampling stage, with mass production anticipated for Q3 of 2013. If you are in the San Jose, CA area between August 13th and 15th, stop into the Flash Memory Summit and visit Silicon Motion at booth #615.