Silicon Motion shows new generation of SSD controllers

Controller manufacturer Silicon Motion Inc showed its latest ssd controller for pci-e-express ssds at Computex that works without dram cache. That should keep the price down in budget SSDs. In addition, the company showed its new high-end controller.

By equipping SSDs with controllers without a dram cache, a piece of memory in which the controller keeps track of where which data is written, costs can be saved and a manufacturer does not have to buy memory from third parties: not all controller manufacturers also produce dram. Silicon Motion has therefore built its latest controller for budget drives, the SM2263XT, without cache. Instead, system memory is used to temporarily store data. Performance does suffer from the cost reduction, although using only four nand channels doesn’t help either. That’s not a bad thing, because the drive is being developed for budget SSDs that don’t have a large capacity. Nevertheless, the m2 SSD shown managed to achieve a decent performance of about 2000MB/s and 1500MB/s for sequential read and write respectively. The controller is used in Crucial’s BX300 SSD, which would be available on July 4 in capacities up to 512GB. Incidentally, that will be a 2.5″ drive with a SATA interface, so the speeds are then limited by the SATA bus, which in practice amounts to about 500MB/s. The latest high-end controller succeeds the SM2260 and will be designated SM2262. This controller has dram cache on board and doubles the number of nand channels to eight instead of four like the SM2263XT.Like the cheap version, the SM2262 supports nand from Micron and Toshiba in the form of 64- layer 3d-nand and BiCS 3, both with speeds up to 667MT/s.The 2262 is also a lot faster, judging by the demo SSD, which reached speeds of about 2800MB/s for sequential read and 1750MB/s for write. controllers will start mass production in the third quarter of this year, although Crucial apparently got an earlier batch.