A new SSD con­trol­ler desi­gner is coming out of ste­alth mode today. Inno­grit was foun­ded in 2016 by sto­rage indus­try veterans with the goal of deve­lo­ping sto­rage tech­no­lo­gy to sup­port AI and big data appli­ca­ti­ons. We spo­ke with co-foun­der Dr. Zining Wu (form­er­ly Marvell’s CTO) about the company’s plan­ned pro­duct lin­e­up, and he will be pre­sen­ting more infor­ma­ti­on next week in a key­note speech at Flash Memo­ry Summit.

Innogrit’s long term goal is to go after the enter­pri­se sto­rage mar­ket, but they are start­ing small with a DRAM­less cli­ent SSD con­trol­ler, the IG5208 “Shas­ta”. This is alre­a­dy in mass pro­duc­tion with full turn­key refe­rence SSD designs available. It will be fol­lo­wed up incre­men­tal­ly lar­ger con­trol­lers with more advan­ced fea­ture sets: Shas­ta+, Rai­nier and Taco­ma. With each ite­ra­ti­on, Inno­grit is incre­asing per­for­mance, adding more fea­tures and impro­ving their LDPC error cor­rec­tion engine.

The Shas­ta and Shas­ta+ con­trol­lers are both pri­ma­ri­ly tar­ge­ting the cli­ent SSD mar­ket, and they are desi­gned as low-cost main­stream solu­ti­ons. Shas­ta has just two PCIe 3 lanes while Shas­ta+ has four lanes and con­se­quent­ly hig­her per­for­mance, but other­wi­se they are quite simi­lar. Both are 28nm designs and use the NVMe Host Memo­ry Buf­fer fea­ture rather than inclu­ding DRAM con­trol­lers. Both con­trol­lers are small enough to be packa­ged insi­de sin­gle-chip BGA SSDs, and Innogrit’s refe­rence designs for Shas­ta-based SSDs include the stan­dard 11.5x13mm and 16x20mm BGA SSD foot­prints and a CFX card design. The impro­ved ECC capa­bi­li­ties of Shas­ta+ will make it a bet­ter choice for QLC-based SSDs, but both con­trol­lers sup­port the full ran­ge of SLC through QLC from mul­ti­ple manufacturers.

Becau­se Shas­ta and Shas­ta+ are step­ping stones toward the enter­pri­se and dat­a­cen­ter mar­kets, they include sup­port for some fea­tures not com­mon­ly found on cli­ent SSDs, such as an Open-Chan­nel SSD ope­ra­ting mode. End-to-end data path pro­tec­tion is included, with ECC on all the controller’s SRAM buf­fers and on data stored in the Host Memo­ry Buf­fer. Power manage­ment appro­pria­te for cli­ent and embedded use is sup­port­ed, with Shas­ta pea­king at 0.9W and sup­port­ing idle sta­tes at 55mW and less than 1mW, while Shas­ta+ will peak at about 1.35W. The NVMe Boot Par­ti­ti­on fea­ture is also sup­port­ed for embedded sys­tems that don’t include a sepa­ra­te boot ROM device.

Innogrit’s Rai­nier con­trol­ler is a signi­fi­cant gene­ra­tio­nal advan­ce over the Shas­ta fami­ly, moving up to the high-end cli­ent and ent­ry-level dat­a­cen­ter mar­kets. Rai­nier swit­ches to one of TSMC’s 16/12nm Fin­FET pro­ces­ses, which Inno­grit (and most other con­trol­ler desi­gners) sees as neces­sa­ry for PCIe gen4 sup­port with reasonable power con­sump­ti­on. Rai­nier has 8 NAND chan­nels that can run at up to 1200MT/s, fast enough for any curr­ent­ly-available NAND. This allows for sequen­ti­al read and wri­te speeds of up to 7GB/s and 6.1GB/s respec­tively, more or less satu­ra­ting the PCIe 4 x4 inter­face. Rai­nier adds enter­pri­se-ori­en­ted fea­tures like mul­ti­ple name­space sup­port and SR-IOV vir­tua­liza­ti­on, but cli­ent-ori­en­ted power manage­ment is still sup­port­ed, with idle sta­tes for 50mW and less than 2mW.

The most powerful con­trol­ler on Innogrit’s road­map is Taco­ma, which builds on Rai­nier by doubling the NAND chan­nel count to 16 (brin­ging the maxi­mum sup­port­ed capa­ci­ty up to 32TB), widening the DRAM inter­face to 72 bits (64b with ECC), and adding more high-end enter­pri­se fea­tures. Sequen­ti­al IO per­for­mance will be rough­ly the same as for Rai­nier but ran­dom IO gets a boost from the extra par­al­le­lism. The vir­tua­liza­ti­on capa­bi­li­ties have been enhan­ced rela­ti­ve to Rai­nier and the NVMe Con­trol­ler Memo­ry Buf­fer fea­ture is sup­port­ed, which comes in han­dy for NVMe over Fabrics deploy­ments. A spe­cial low-laten­cy mode is intro­du­ced, which Inno­grit will be demons­t­ra­ting with Toshiba’s XL-FLASH (their ans­wer to Samsung’s Z‑NAND). Per­haps the most important fea­ture of Taco­ma is the addi­ti­on of in-sto­rage com­pu­te with a deep lear­ning acce­le­ra­tor; more infor­ma­ti­on about this will be shared next week during Innogrit’s key­note pre­sen­ta­ti­on at Flash Memo­ry Summit.

Innogrit’s busi­ness model will be simi­lar to most other inde­pen­dent SSD con­trol­ler ven­dors, offe­ring SSD ven­dors a ran­ge of opti­ons from a basic SDK for cus­tom firm­ware up to full turn­key SSD designs. They have seve­ral design wins with the Shas­ta fami­ly con­trol­lers and are alre­a­dy sam­pling the Rai­nier and Taco­ma controllers.