KAIST Professor Myung-Soo Jeong's research team, free of charge
Freely modifiable NVMe controller IP
Accelerating the development of next-generation memory with the release of OpenExpress.


NVMe controller technology, which significantly improves performance to make it suitable for next-generation memory development, has been developed by domestic researchers and released free of charge.

Professor Myung-Soo Jeong's research team from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at KAIST announced on the 4th that they have developed 'OpenExpress', a next-generation NVMe controller that implements data parallel input/output processing of SSDs in pure hardware.

NVMe is a non-volatile memory interface standard that is six times faster than SATA. It was developed to replace the SATA standard, which was designed for HDDs, as it did not perform well on SSDs.

Major ICT companies around the world are investing heavily in proprietary development to secure the hardware NVMe controller IP required to use NVMe. However, this IP is not publicly available, making it difficult for universities and research institutes to use it for research purposes.

A small number of venture companies in Silicon Valley in the United States provide some of their own IP, but they charge a monthly fee of about 40 million won. Additionally, to receive single-use source code for IP modification, you must pay approximately 100 million won per copy.

To solve these problems, Professor Jeong Myeong-su's research team developed OpenExpress, a freely modifiable hardware NVMe controller IP, and released it free of charge. This public controller consists of dozens of hardware basic IPs and several core NVMe IP cores.

Professor Jeong's team prototyped an NVMe hardware controller using OpenExpress for actual performance evaluation, and designed all logic provided by OpenExpress to operate at high frequencies.

The FPGA storage card prototype developed using OpenExpress supports a bandwidth of up to 7 GB/s, making it suitable for research on ultra-high-speed next-generation memory.

Tests comparing various storage server workloads also demonstrated 76% higher bandwidth and 68% lower input/output latency than Intel's Optane SSD. Professor Yeon's team predicted that synthesizing silicon devices according to user needs could yield even higher performance.

The controller developed by Professor Jeong's team can be freely used and modified by non-profit universities and research institutes under the OpenExpress open source license. Therefore, it is ideal for research on NVMe controllers and software stacks that accommodate next-generation memory.

Meanwhile, this research was conducted with the support of MemRay, a next-generation memory developer and supplier.