PLDA and Epostar to Demo PCIe/NVMe Solution

PLDA and Epostar Electronics Corp. announced a demonstration of a development platform enabling PCIe and NVMe for storage applications.

This demonstration is the next step in PLDA’s focus on the storage market. Following the release of the first PCIe 4.0 platform for storage companies, this announcement delivers a solution for NVMe applications, provide technology for PCIe SSD drives while delivering significant latency and performance benefits for SSD storage applications.

The demonstration can be viewed in PLDA and Epostar’s booths at the Flash Memory Summit, being held in San Jose, CA, on August 9-11, 2016.

Internet-based storage and cloud computing have rapidly increased the need to manage ‘big data,’ and have created a growth explosion in server-based storage sites. IC designers creating products for this space focus on generating high speed, low latency components. Incorporating an industry-standard PCIe interface allows designers to more easily deliver low latency and high data rates by enabling PCIe 3.0 throughput of up to 6.6Gb/s in an x8 configuration. Because PCIe is an industry standard, it provides a path to PCIe 4.0 solutions, which can further improve the throughput to 16GT/s per lane with PCIe 4.0 technology combined with NVMe.

In this demonstration, a PLDA Xilinx Kintex UltraScale-based XpressKUS board will be set up to function as an NVMe RAMDisk and will include a PLDA XpressRICH3-AXI PCIe 3.0 controller combined with an Epostar NVMe IP. This demonstration will validate compliance between the NVMe IP and the PCIe controller and will showcase a transfer of files between the host and the SSD, generated via a stress test on the SSD.

According to Arnaud Schleich, CEO, PLDA, “PLDA has been an industry leader in PCIe innovation for almost two decades and we are proud to advance both PCIe 4.0 and PCIe/NVMe development to meet customer needs within the storage industry. Streamlining designs while increasing performance through the use of an industry-standard interface like PCIe, will be a key market differentiator for innovative SSD designers.“

“EpoStar NVMe IP is not only compliant with the NVMe specification, but instead is designed to take great advantage of this industry standard. Its architecture is defined in a way to bring excellent performance and flexibility to the next generation of SSDs. We are pleased to partner with PLDA, providing customers a seamless and quick time-to-market solution.” Said Minghau Lee, CEO, EpoStar.

NVMe Controller Core (Meissa)
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About EpoStar NVMe controller core:
NVMe Controller Core (Meissa) is compliant with NVM Express 1.2 specification and targets for both enterprise and client SSD markets. It is a highly hardware automated design that requires minimum software involvement from the CPU. It supports out-of-order IO Read data transfer and PRP pre-fetch which can boost the IO/s performance and minimize the Read latency. The end-to-end data protection and error handling mechanism of Meissa enable robust and reliable SSD products. Meissa is highly flexible and can be configured to fit in requirements of different applications. Meissa is delivered with a complete development package for the ease of use in both FPGA and SoC integration.

PLDA XpressRICH3-AXI PCIe controller
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About PLDA XpressRICH3-AXI PCIe controller board:
XpressRICH3-AXI is an enterprise PCIe interface soft IP with a configurable AMBA AXI3/AXI4 user interface and high-performance DMA address translation, ECAM, TrustZone, data protection (ECC, ECRC), endpoint and root port support. With SR-IOV, 6 BARs+ EPROM and Open interrupt interface supports, it enables NVMe and SATA Express implementation. Benefiting from a close collaboration with ARM, XpressRICH3-AXI is the most advanced PCIe interfacing solution for ARM embedded processors, featuring a unique architecture and features specifically engineered for AMBA AXI-based SoC.