On September 27, the Third GMIF2024 Innovation Summit (Global Memory Innovation Forum) was successfully concluded in Shenzhen. The event was hosted by the Semiconductor Investment Alliance and the Shenzhen Memory Industry Association, co-organized by the Guangdong Integrated Circuit Industry Association and the Shenzhen Semiconductor Industry Association, and organized by JW Insights Consulting (Xiamen) Co., Ltd. and Haitong Securities Co., Ltd.
As the world’s largest NAND Flash controller supplier and a market leader in SSD controller, Silicon Motion took part in this event and comprehensively showcased its controller products including the SM2508, SM2322, SM2268XT2, and Ferri-eMMC series.
Silicon Motion Exhibition Booth
To recognize and encourage Silicon Motion’s continuous innovation in flash memory controller and outstanding contributions to enhancing controller performance, Silicon Motion was awarded the “Outstanding Controller Leadership Award” from the list of winners of the GMIF 2024 Annual Awards, announced during the summit.
Digital infrastructure has been confronted with new challenges with the increasing heat of AI wave across the globe over the past few years. High-performance and large-capacity storage systems have become key enablers for unleashing AI potential, and in particular, the diversification of AI application scenarios has also placed higher demands on storage systems in terms of scalability, reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness. Storage controllers, as core components that control storage media read/write and space management, holds a vital position in the storage sector. According to QY Research data, the global controller market sales reached $2.423 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $3.264 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.92%.
With aims to meet growing market demands, Silicon Motion has made continuous efforts to optimize data processing capabilities across AI stages. Through innovative architectural designs that increase bandwidth and improve read/write speeds, significant strides have been made in improving the read/write efficiency and extending lifespan to accommodate the high-efficient data transmission and processing needs demanded by AI.
Wallace C. Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion
Wallace C. Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion, delivered a keynote speech titled “AI Craze: Data Dominance, Silicon Motion’s AI Storage Strategy” at the innovation summit. Mr. Kou shared Silicon Motion’s innovative flash memory controller solutions and cutting-edge technologies for various AI application scenarios. He also discussed how Silicon Motion continues to leverage its core competitiveness in the storage field through continuous technological innovation and comprehensive AI storage strategies to provide customers with efficient, secure, and reliable storage solutions.
Kou pointed out that AI is continuously adding fuels to global market growth, and storage stands as one of the key areas in the artificial intelligence ecosystem. The market shows strong appetite for more relevant software and applications, making AI edge devices more meaningful and attractive to consumers. In spite of the thriving development of AI servers and data centers in 2024, other consumer electronics products are still at the ebbing point of weak demand and facing various kinds of challenges. Nevertheless, Kou still expressed that there’s no need to worry too much about the recent demand weakness, as the storage market remains bright and promising with many new growth opportunities.
In this context, Silicon Motion, the world’s largest NAND Flash controller supplier, boasts comprehensive product layouts and market strategies to empower customers successfully capture these massive business opportunities.
Kou indicated that all Silicon Motion product lines support QLC, capable of meeting customers’ needs for large-capacity storage application while achieving cost reduction and rapid shipment goals. Besides efforts on product line at the product strategy level, Silicon Motion also highly engages in technical support of storage and firmware. For terminal devices, Silicon Motion’s PCIe Gen5 SSD controllers and UFS4.0 feature ultra-high performance and low power consumption that can meet demands of AI PCs and AI phones. From the perspective of enterprise-grade storage, its enterprise SSD development platform of MonTitan supports two key enterprise storage technologies, ZNS and FDP, assisting to optimize system data placement. Grounded on its PerformaShape™ and NANDCommand™ technologies, Silicon Motion also ensures maximum bandwidth performance and reliability that further meet high-performance and high-reliability requirements of AI applications.
In terms of design services, Silicon Motion’s long-term partnerships with major phone manufacturers, PC OEMs, data center operators, automobile manufacturers, and industrial control system manufacturers contribute to deep understanding of customer pain points and needs, leading to products better suited to actual application scenarios.
In the following section, Kou provided detailed introductions to a series of Silicon Motion products including SM8366, SM2508, SM2756, and SM2264XT-AT.
The SM8366 enterprise PCIe Gen5 controller achieves sequential read speeds of up to 14GB/s and random read performance of 3.5M IOPS, demonstrating significant performance improvements compared to the previous PCIe Gen4 products. To address performance interference issues in multi-tenant data center application environments, the SM8366 controller employs dual-state token bucket algorithms and hardware isolation measures, ensuring maximum bandwidth performance and user-defined specific performance indicators (such as QoS, latency, random read/write, and power consumption). This refined QoS control capability effectively reduces performance interference between multiple tenants and enhances the overall stability and reliability of storage system.
It’s known that Silicon Motion has incorporated multiple innovative technologies into the SM8366 controller to enhance data security and durability. This chip adopts state-of-the-art technologies of 5th generation high-performance LDPC error correction code (ECC), RAID machine learning algorithms, and real-time comprehensive medium layer interface scanning and retrieval, which effectively ensure data integrity and reliability. Meanwhile, Silicon Motion also provides AES-256 level hardware encryption functionality which complies with TCG Opal standards, providing solid protection for user data security.
The SM2508 is a high-performance, low-power PCIe Gen5 SSD controller designed for AI laptops requiring high-capacity, high-performance, and low-power storage solutions. Compared to competitors using a 12nm process, the SM2508 achieves a 50% reduction in power consumption, bringing total SSD power consumption below 7W. It delivers 1.7 times the power efficiency of PCIe 4.0 SSDs and offers a 70% improvement over competing PCIe 5.0 SSDs currently on the market. Furthermore, it’s compatible with the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND, enabling larger data capacity to meet the evolving needs of AI PCs.
The SM2756 is among the most advanced UFS 4.0 controller solutions in the world today. On the basis of 6nm EUV, SM2756 adopts a dual-channel design with MIPI M-PHY low-power architecture, achieving perfect balance between performance and power consumption and satisfying today’s 24-hour computing needs of top AI mobile devices. Its sequential read speed exceeds 4300 MB/s, and sequential write speed reaches 4000 MB/s, supporting various 3D TLC NAND flash and QLC NAND flash with capacity up to 2TB.
Silicon Motion’s SM2264XT-AT is an automotive-grade PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD
controller designed to provide excellent performance and high reliability for emerging automotive centralized computing and ADAS/autonomous driving architectures. The SM2264XT-AT features a quad-core ARM R8® CPU, includes four PCIe 16GB/s data buses, incorporates built-in SR-IOV functionality, and supports up to 8 virtual machines (VMs), making it highly suitable for future vehicles requiring centralized storage architecture.
Looking ahead, as technologies like 5G, IoT, electric vehicles and connected cars, and generative AI continue to evolve, market demand for storage will continue to expand. Silicon Motion will increase R&D investment, leverage its competitive advantages in firmware design and customized services, and work closely with partners across different fields to provide more efficient, reliable, and secure storage solutions, empowering customers to capture the massive opportunities in the AI era.