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

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At Computex 2023, Phison is introducing a new, lower-cost SSD controller for building mainstream PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The Phison PS5031-E31T is a quad channel, DRAM-less controller for solid-state drives that is designed to offer sequential read/write speeds up to 10,8 GB/s at drive capacities of up to 8 TB, which is in line with some of the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs available today.

The Phison E31T controller is, at a high level, the lower-cost counterpart to Phison's current high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD controller, the E26. The E31T is based around multiple Arm Cortex R5 cores for realtime operations, and in Phison designs these are traditionally accompanied by special-purpose accelerators that belong to the company's CoXProcessor package. The chip supports Phison's 7^th Generation LDPC engine with RAID ECC and 4K code word to handle the latest and upcoming 3D TLC and 3D QLC types of 3D NAND. The controller also supports AES256, TCG Opal, and Pyrite encryption.

The SSD controller is organized in four NAND channels with 16 chip enable lines (CEs) in total, allowing it to address 4 NAND dies per channel. For now Phison is refraining from disclosing NAND interface speeds the controller supports, though given the fact that the controller is set to support sequential read/write throughput of 10,800 MB/s over four channels, napkin math indicates they'll need to support transfer rates of at least 2700 MT/s. This is on the upper-end of current ONFi/Toggle standards, but still readily attained. For example, Kioxia's and Western Digital's latest 218-layer BICS 3D NAND devices support a 3200 MT/s interface speed (which provides a peak sequential read/write speed of 400 MB/s).

Phison says that its E31T controller will enable M.2-2280 SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and a capacities of up to 8 TB. Phison's DRAM-less controllers tend to remain in use in SSD designs for quite a while due to their mainstream posiitoning and relatively cheap price, so, unsurprisingly, Phison traditionally opts to plan for the long term with regards to capacity. 8 TB SSDs will eventually come down in price, even if they aren't here quite yet.

Phison NVMe SSD Controller Comparsion
	E31T	E21T	E19T	E26	E18
Market Segment	Mainstream Consumer			High-End Consumer
Manufacturing Process	7nm	12nm	28 nm	12nm	12nm
CPU Cores	1x Cortex R5	1x Cortex R5	1x Cortex R5	2x Cortex R5	3x Cortex R5
Error Correction	7th Gen LDPC	4th Gen LDPC		5th Gen LDPC	4th Gen LDPC
DRAM	No	No	No	DDR4, LPDDR4	DDR4
Host Interface	PCIe 5.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 5.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe Version	NVMe 2.0?	NVMe 1.4	NVMe 1.4	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 1.4
NAND Channels, Interface Speed	4 ch, 3200 MT/s?	4 ch, 1600 MT/s	4 ch, 1400 MT/s	8 ch, 2400 MT/s	8 ch, 1600 MT/s
Max Capacity	8 TB	4 TB	2 TB	8 TB	8 TB
Sequential Read	10.8 GB/s	5.0 GB/s	3.7 GB/s	14 GB/s	7.4 GB/s
Sequential Write	10.8 GB/s	4.5 GB/s	3.0 GB/s	11.8 GB/s	7.0 GB/s
4KB Random Read IOPS	1500k	780k	440k	1500k	1000k
4KB Random Write IOPS	1500k	800k	630k	2000k	1000k

Compared to the high-end E26 controller, the E31T supports fewer NAND channels and NAND dies overall, but enthusiasts will also want to take note of the manufacturing process Phison is using for the controller. Phison is scheduled to build the E31T on TSMC's 7nm process, which although is no longer-cutting edge, is a full generation ahead of the 12nm process used for the E26. So combined with the reduced complexity of the controller, this should bode well for cooler running and less power-hungry PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

The smaller, mainstream-focused chip should also allow for those PCIe 5.0 SSDs to be cheaper. Though, as always, it should be noted that Phison doesn't publicly talk about controller pricing, let alone control what their customers (SSD vendors) charge for their finished drives.

As for availability of drives based on Phison's new controller, as Phison has not yet announced an expected sampling date, you shouldn't expect to see E31T drives for a while. Phison typically announces new controllers fairly early in the SSD development process, so there's typically at least a several month gap before finished SSDs hit the market. As Phison's second PCIe 5.0 controller, the E31T should hopefully encounter fewer teething issues than the initial E26, but we'd still expect E31T drives to be 2024 products.

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