IDT (www.idt.com), a leading analog and digital company in core semiconductor solutions, today introduced the industry's first NVM Express (NVMe) enterprise flash memory controller with native PCIe® Gen 3 support. IDT's NVMe flash controller product family is a standards-based SSD solution that enables storage and server OEMs to overcome the latency and throughput bottlenecks inherent in existing SAS/SATA-based solid-state drive (SSD) designs.
IDT's newly introduced flash memory controller product family consists of two versions: a 16-channel version (89HF16P04AG3) supporting PCIe x4 Gen 3 and a 32-channel version (89HF32P08AG3) supporting PCIe x8 Gen 3. These flash controllers are designed to fully comply with the NVMe standard. This standard defines register interfaces, command sets, and specifications optimized for PCIe SSDs. The purpose of establishing this standard is to enable widespread adoption of PCIe-based SSDs and provide a scalable interface that delivers the performance potential of SSD technology both now and in the future. Once the standard is established, storage and server OEMs will not need to separately qualify multiple SSD drivers, making PCIe SSD adoption more straightforward and expanding market opportunities, while also delivering significant improvements in storage latency, throughput, power consumption, and cost.
Kam Eshghi, Senior Marketing Manager of IDT's Enterprise Computing division, stated, "As a founding member of the NVMe Promotion Group and developer of the industry's first PCIe enterprise flash controller launched last year, IDT is leading innovation in PCIe-based flash controllers." He added, "In many data center applications, NAND flash read and write speeds already exceed the performance of existing SAS/SATA interconnects. IDT has developed an NVMe-compliant PCIe flash controller product family that significantly increases the random I/O operations per second (IOPS) that can be processed in a single system, while eliminating legacy storage infrastructure to reduce latency, power consumption, and cost. Given the early interest and other positive indicators, we expect this technology to proliferate rapidly in the future, and IDT is fully prepared to support it."
Amber Huffman, Principal Engineer at Intel Storage Technology Group and Chairman of the NVM Express Workgroup, stated, "NVM Express provides key elements that enable widespread adoption of PCIe-based SSD solutions. IDT has been an early adopter and significant contributor to the PCIe and NVMe ecosystem. We are pleased to see companies like IDT supplying NVMe SSD controller products that will help realize next-generation PCIe SSD designs as part of the growing NVMe ecosystem."
Joseph Unsworth, Vice President of Research at Gartner, noted, "The enterprise SSD market will grow to enormous scale, representing approximately half of the total SSD market by 2012. By 2015, we expect the PCIe enterprise controller market to grow more than four-fold with shipments approaching 3.5 million units. Therefore, companies that can supply fully-featured, high-performance controller solutions will be best positioned to capture market opportunities."
IDT's PCIe flash controllers are sold to enterprise SSD developers manufacturing standards-based NVMe SSDs with PCIe Gen 3 or Gen 2 host interfaces. These SSDs are used in enterprise-focused storage systems, server caching applications, and other systems requiring high-performance storage drives. End users will deploy these PCIe SSD-based systems in their data centers for mission-critical cloud computing and business applications, including online transaction processing, financial data processing, database mining, and other applications where storage performance is critical.
IDT's flash controllers fully support the PCIe Gen 3 host interface to maximize throughput, and also provide full programmability, allowing customers to differentiate their solutions through custom firmware utilizing IDT's reference firmware. IDT's product family is designed to maximize random storage I/O performance, a critical requirement for multi-core CPU designs and virtualization. Additionally, these flash controllers support various enterprise-class specifications including advanced encryption, data integrity, and reliability features.
To see performance demonstrations of PCIe-based SSDs using IDT's latest flash controller, visit IDT at the Flash Memory Summit held in Santa Clara, California from August 21-23. For detailed information on NVMe specifications, visit www.nvmexpress.org.

Availability
IDT 89HF16P04AG3 and 89HF32P08AG3 samples are currently available to selected customers and are supplied in 27 x 27mm FCBGA and 40 x 40mm FCBGA packages, respectively. For detailed information on IDT's comprehensive portfolio of PCIe switches, bridges, clocks, signal integrity products, and flash controller product family, visit www.idt.com/go/PCIe.