Start-Up Profile: PetaIO

Company
PetaIO, Inc.

Locations
Santa Clara (CA), China and Seoul, South Korea

Born in
2016

Financial funding
$16 million, according to Tim Ding who is also seed investor; In August 2018, E-Town International Holding (Hong Kong) Co. invested in the start-up.

Main executives
They are a group of engineers and serial entrepreneur who have been working on NAND based storage solutions last 15 years.

Chairman and founder since 2016 Tim Ding, who was formerly:

• president, CEO, co-founder and seed investor of HoneycombData Inc. for 5 years
• co-founder and founding CEO of TiDAL Systems Inc. (Micron Technology, Inc.) for a little more than 2 years
• VP of sales and technical marketing at Link-A-Media Devices for more than 2 years
• director of sales, marketing and field engineering for LSI Corp. (now Broadcom, Inc.) from 2002 to 2010
• manager, hardware department at Microstor and Castlewood Systems from 1998 to 2002
• staff/advisory engineer for Seagate Technology from 1994 to 1998

Technology
PCIe Gen4x4 SSD controller targeting data center applications for AFAs

Products
Titanium-DC is a PCIe Gen4x4, NVMe 1.4, 8-channel controller delivering 7GB/s sequential read, 6GB/s sequential write, 1.2 million IO/s random read and 420,000 IO/s sustained random write with burst up to 1.2 million IO/s.

Its architecture and implementation achieved a very small area and power achieving die size at 29.9mm² in TSMC 16/12nm FinFET process node, a typical power of 2.75W and peak power <3.5W resulting in 100,000 IO/s write random read and 80,000 IO/s write random mix for an 8TB TLC SSD configuration.
With a total ASIC read latency of 10μs, Titanium-DC delivers performance also at low queue depth for response-time sensitive applications.

Availability
In small sample quantities to partners for their PCIe-4 SSDs evaluation and development usage and SSD reference design in U.2 form factor to be available soon upon request, followed by M.2 form factors

Roadmap
Thanks to company’s ‘4-able’ architecture (Flexible, Scale-able, Configurable and Customize-able), it includes an upcoming 16-channel PCIe Gen4x8 for storage performances and capacity. Titanium-XP will support up 32TB capacities delivering 10GB/s sequential read, 8GB/s sequential write, 2 million IO/s random read and up to 2 million IO/s random write.

PetaIO has also demonstrated Titanium-XL architecture targeting low latency flash and SCM with a 2.7μs total ASIC read latency. The team has completed Titanium-XL SoC design and can start with working partners upon business partnership. All Titanium-XL development efforts have been done by working with an unknown NAND OEM partner.

Titanium DC and Titanium-XP specs

(1) sustained – peak performance
(2) Based on 8TB SSD with 3D TLC flash