LSI Begin to Ship 40nm Serial PHY

LSI Corporation has begun shipping samples of the industry’s first 40-nanometer multi-interface physical layer (PHY) IP designed for notebook, desktop and enterprise hard disk drive (HDD) market segments.

The LSI TrueStore PHY9500 provides drive makers with a single solution for integration into system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs across all major HDD and solid-state drive (SSD) markets, supporting the 6Gb/s SAS, 6Gb/s SATA and 4.25Gb/s Fibre Channel interface standards. Drive manufacturers who integrate the PHY9500 into their SoCs should benefit from reduced validation and development costs, lower risks and an accelerated time to market. The TrueStore PHY9500 also can enable enterprise SSD designs to unlock the full performance benefit of the SAS interface.

"LSI continues to blaze the 40nm trail as part of our total recording system design, which includes the recently introduced RC9500 low-density parity check (LDPC) read channel," said Phil Brace, senior vice president, Storage Peripherals Division, LSI. "The versatility of the PHY9500 allows drive makers to benefit by only having a single part to qualify. This opens the door to significant cost savings and allows customers to focus on system-level design."

The PHY9500 reduces transmit jitter by up to 30 percent, providing improved signal performance as compared to the previous generation. Receiver performance has been enhanced with an advanced adaptive equalization scheme, improving signal-to-noise performance regardless of the signal path between host and drive.

System analysis is also simplified with advanced test features including an ‘eye-scope’ feature which enables greater visibility into the receiver’s performance, allowing drive makers to debug their systems without requiring expensive test equipment.

Customers integrating the PHY9500 into their storage SoCs should also realize area and power savings. The PHY9500 offers 1-lane and 2-lane configurations for reduced chip footprint, and supports multiple power management features for improved SoC efficiencies by utilizing power benefits offered by 40nm technology. The PHY9500 supports low-cost wirebond and flip-chip packages to meet the low-cost requirements of high-volume HDD SoCs.

The LSI TrueStore family of ICs for hard disk, tape and solid-state drive components include highly integrated, high-performance storage SoCs, read channels, preamplifiers, serial PHYs and hard disk drive controller IP. By offering a broad portfolio of integrated SoC solutions, LSI enables its customers to address all segments of the HDD market from mission-critical enterprise applications and high-capacity desktop PCs to low-power laptops and a variety of consumer electronic devices.

The TrueStore PHY9500 is available now to qualified customers.