Domestic SSD Master Chip Maker, Achieving a New Breakthrough in PCIe 5.0

New Servers Need New Enterprise-class SSDs

From the observation of industry development, it seems that there are two obvious trends in contemporary servers. Firstly, servers used for high-speed computing have seen a massive increase in demand for various algorithms such as AI, putting forward the need for higher performance for storage; secondly, after the commercialization of the 5G standard, the multiplication of both connection density and traffic density has brought about the need for faster transmission speed and lower latency. "We have now entered an era where 5G and AI are combined and the cloud edge is operating in concert." Wei Zhi Fan, Chief Technical Engineer of Huacun Electronics, judged.

AI technology makes servers to be oriented to more vertical fields such as video surveillance, image processing, and automated customer service, while 5G brings about a shift in communication infrastructure, remote management mode, and connectivity mode, which makes servers already out of people's past stereotypical perceptions.

 One notable change is that data used to be transferred to data centers for computing, but things are different in the 5G era. "The data will be transferred to a high-performance edge server, which may exist anywhere, such as in your home, in your car or in a 5G base station, and the relevant results will be calculated and returned to you." Wei Zhi Pan said.

Industry insiders predict that the biggest change in the computing scene in the next few years will be the rise of edge computing. If cloud computing is directly driving the growth of the server market, AI and 5G-driven edge computing will make the demand for data computing and efficient storage grow exponentially.

Against this backdrop, the penetration of enterprise-class SSDs continues to rise because of their excellent read and write performance as well as latency characteristics that meet the needs of new servers for lower latency and faster transfer capabilities. Mainstream cloud computing vendors such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, AliCloud, Baidu, Tencent, and others see enterprise-class SSDs as the optimal choice for big data usage scenarios. 

Wei believes that although servers correspond to different scenarios, some may favor performance and some may require capacity, there is a common demand for SSDs, which is higher transfer rates, higher stability, and lower power consumption. 

Because of this, a new generation of SSD transfer interface bus standard, PCIe 5.0, has been created. Compared to the 16GT/s of its predecessor PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0 doubles the signal rate to 32GT/s. The extremely high signal rate allows PCIe 5.0 to better support high-performance devices with high throughput requirements, such as GPUs for AI, network devices, etc. 

As server support for PCIe SSDs becomes more mature, enterprise SSDs will become one of the fastest-growing areas of PCIe, and the release of PCIe 5.0 will undoubtedly accelerate this process. 

Precisely seeing that PCIe 5.0 will become a global market trend in the next five years, Huacun Electronics started to layout in advance as early as 2018, and after unremitting efforts, finally streamed the first domestic enterprise-class PCIe Gen5 SSD master chip in October 2021, and achieved successful stream in early 2022. This technical achievement is for the data center and server market, breaking the foreign monopoly and filling the domestic gap.

Three Innovations to Unleash PCIe 5.0 Potential

The PCIe SSD controller chip HC9001 launched by Huacun Electronics is developed according to the cloud/edge/end storage usage scenario under the demand of massive data processing, enabling the enterprise SSD capacity to maximize energy efficiency under PCIe 5.0 standard. The chip's original hard firmware fusion XSDirectA (eXcellent-Scheduling & Direct-Arrival) architecture incorporates a self-developed second-generation 4K-LDPC flash error correction algorithm to improve both QoS quality and transmission rate peaks; adding national security algorithm and AI adaptation function, layers of reinforced security upgrades to enhance data security Storage capacity, to build a more diversified and fully localized storage master chip.

 The main advantage of XSDirectA architecture is that the SSD firmware can process the 4KB data assignment within 250ns, and the relevant information and data can directly reach the location specified by the firmware in the SSD disk. Health status. 

At present, the whole society is advocating energy-saving and emission reduction, as major energy consumer servers naturally bear the brunt. In order not to let the SSD energy consumption also increase significantly, Huacun invented the innovative iPower architecture. This architecture uses monitoring algorithms to reduce the ineffective power consumption in the server caused by the SSD, which can achieve the best PCIe 5.0 transmission performance per unit of power consumption. Moreover, HC9001 combines the sensors inside the SSD disk and the chip with intelligent algorithms to dynamically adjust and control the heat generated by the SSD to control the temperature accuracy to 0.1 degrees Celsius.

Preserving data integrity and correctness is also the main mission of the SSD master, and the HC9001 is equipped with an innovative second-generation LPDC (Low-Density Parity-Check) error correction algorithm architecture specifically for this purpose. The main advantages of this architecture are that the UBER of the SSD will be lower than 10(-17), MTBF can be greater than 2 million hours, DWPD=1.0@5 years, an AI algorithm is used to learn and predict environmental changes to maintain the expectation of QoS at the protocol side. 

HC9001 was built by Huacun Electronics with 4 years of hard work, and its R&D journey overcame many challenges. "The biggest challenge is that when you want to do PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs, the architecture has to be rebuilt." Wei Zhi Pan said.

He explained, "When we were in the pre-R&D stage in '18, the industry was still basically stuck on the old PCIe 3.0 architecture, and we were just a startup company that didn't have enough manpower to develop both old and new architecture enterprise SSD products, so we had to face all the unknown challenges of developing a new architecture." 

The good thing is that Huacun Electronics has an excellent R&D team with members who have more than 15 years of R&D experience. In accordance with the law of evolution between generations, they kept pushing technical details and finally overcame the difficulties. 

Although the PCIe 5.0 standard has just started, from the current point of view, the market maintains a very positive attitude towards it, especially the enterprise SSD market is the most vociferous. Wei Zhi Fan believes that with the rapid launch of CPUs and platforms supporting PCIe Gen5 in the industry both at home and abroad, the future PCIe 5.0 ecological structure will definitely increase rapidly in maturity and SSD penetration. 

According to him, HC9001 development is going smoothly, and the engineering prototype has been connected to the CPU via PCIe 5.0 on the motherboard of the 12th generation Core, and the final product will be mass-produced in the second half of this year.

Continue to Expand the Circle of Industry Chain Friends

Due to the launch of the new standard, the PCIe market is in a period of rapid development. According to related organizations, the global PCIe market will grow by $2.17 billion from 2021-to 2025, with a CAGR of more than 22% during the forecast period. According to a report released by Ariadne Consulting, the market size of China's enterprise SSD is 16.1 billion yuan in 2020, of which PCIe SSD accounts for about 59% of the total market size and has surpassed SATA and other types of enterprise SSDs.

Huan Electronics has achieved good results in the SSD market so far. PCIe SSD products for the PC market and eMMC products for the smart home appliance market have achieved large volume market success. After the technology precipitation and customer service in the past 4 years, Huacun has been widely recognized in the IoT and desktop side, and the orders have shifted to high volume supply.

For the latest master control HC9001, Huacun is not only fine-tuning the product itself but also working closely with more industry chain companies, hoping to achieve more breakthroughs.

We said that Huacun will cooperate with domestic and international storage particle vendors, CPU vendors, cloud computing vendors, and system providers in depth. "When we launch our products, we will consider various dimensions of compatibility and start multi-level cooperation with supply chain vendors."

Song Yuanzen, vice president of Huacun Electronics, said, "The supply chain vendors are all entering the PCIe 5.0 ecology for the first time, so we pay great attention to doing deep cooperation with the whole industry chain to jointly explore the technical potential of the next-generation server ecology. Especially in the domestic server ecological market, we hope to work together at the critical point in time when next-generation information technology is catching up and surpassing, to improve overall performance, reduce overall power consumption, release high-performance computing power, etc., together to build a perfect ecology that fits the domestic market demand."

"At the same time, we also actively cooperate with customers downstream of the industry chain, including server OEM/ODM manufacturers, high-performance computing industry customers, and cloud service providers, to do some customized development services on the storage side." He added.

The server market is expected to continue to heat up in the future, and Huacun Electronics will continue to work hard in this field. "Through the existing master chip, we will follow the more segmented technical evolution of storage now and continue to focus our R&D direction on top of the enterprise-level needs." Wei Zhi Fan concluded, "At the same time, we also hope to work closely with the entire industry chain and contribute our share to the progress of domestic storage.

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