At CES2021, Phison announced the launch of a new main control chip for entry-level SSDs using the PCI-E 4.0 x4 interface. It supports the latest types of 3D NAND flash with an interface speed of 1600 MT/s and promises sequential read speeds of up to 5000 MBps. At the same time, it is manufactured with advanced process technology, and the volume is very small, which means lower cost, and solid-state drives can also be designed to be smaller.

Phison PS5021-E21T is a four-channel controller without DRAM, supporting PCI-E 4.0 x4 interface, NVMe 1.4 protocol, and various types of 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND flash memory, using Toggle 4.0 or ONFi 4.2 interface, with transfer rates up to 1600MT/s.

The PS5021-E21T controller supports Phison's fourth-generation LDPC ECC, end-to-end data path protection, and Smart ECC 2.0 (RAID ECC) technology. In addition, the controller supports all advanced security and encryption functions such as TCG OPAL2.0/Pyrite, AES256, SHA512 and RSA4096.

Phison's latest main control chip allows SSD manufacturers to build entry-level products with sequential read and write speeds up to 5000/4500 MBps and random read and write speeds up to 780K/800K IOPS. Obviously, the speed of the high-end solid state drive equipped with PS5018-E18 is much faster than that of PS5021-E21T, the continuous read and write throughput is as high as 7400/7000MB/s, and the random read and write IOPS is also as high as 1,000,000.

The PS5021-E21T main controller is manufactured using TSMC’s 12nm process and is packaged in FCCSP with a size of 7.5mm×12mm, which minimizes the die size, cost and power consumption of the PS5021-E21T controller. According to Phison, if a 4TB M.2-2280/2230 SSD with Micron’s 176-layer N48R 3D QLC flash memory is used, the average power consumption is only about 4.6W, and in PS4/L1.2 low-power mode, the power consumption is less than 2mW .

Since Phison provides the PS5019-E19 master control for Microsoft's Xbox Series X game console, Phison's new master control chip supports DirectStorage technology at the hardware level. However, in order to fully enable it, multiple system-wide functions need to be supported, so neither Phison nor other SSD master chip manufacturers have talked about support for this technology.