Phison PS5018-E18 (E18) PCIe 4.0 Controller Enters SSD Market

Phison Electronics Corporation just announced that their PS5018-E18 (E18) PCIe 4.0 SSD controller is ready to be unleashed and it has entered the market. The Phison E18 is their first fully native PCIe Gen 4.0 x4 controller and it was made by TSMC on the 12nm process node. The result is an SSD controller that delivers sequential read performance up to 7.4GB/s and sequential write performance to 7.0GB/s! Phison claims that their E18 the only solution in the market to break the 7.0GB/s on both sequential reads and writes. When fully utilized, the eight-channel E18 delivers up to 1 million IOPS for Random 4K operations. Each channel is clocked at 1,600 MT/s

Phison released the PS5016-E16 PCIe Gen 4.0 x4 controller in 2019 and it was capable of delivering sequential performance numbers of up to 5.0 GB/s read and 4.4 GB/s write. That makes the 2nd Gen E18 controller about 1.5x faster that what was just released last year. It also happens to be about 2.1x faster than a typical PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD. The Phison E16 was made on the 28nm manufacturing process, so the move to the 12nm manufacturing processor was a big leap forward for this generation. Phison says that the E18 is ideal for gamers, content creators, and computing enthusiasts, which demand the best experience.

The Phison E18 is compatible with the NVMe 1.4 specification and is powered by Triple ARM Cortex R5 CPUs along with Phisons proprietary CoXProcessor 2.0. It does have AES 256-bit hardware encryption and support for the TCG OPAL 2.0 storage security subsystem as well as Pyrite.

Industry leader comments about the Phison E18 controller include:

AMD leads the industry with the first desktop processor and chipset support for PCIe 4.0. As we continue to build new platforms that support PCIe 4.0 technologies, we are happy to see companies like Phison expanding their Gen 4 SSD product offerings, said Chris Kilburn, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Client Component business unit, AMD. In partnership with industry leading storage companies like Phison, we are committed to delivering new levels of storage performance across the entire PC landscape.

It is forecasted that over the next few years, PCIe Gen 4 will lead in the client SSD market. Phison was one of the first to ship a Gen 4×4 SSD and has a leadership position in providing customers the best-in-class SSD for high performance client and desktop applications and gaming, says Don Jeanette, Vice President, SSD Research at TrendFocus.

While other companies are just now starting to release their first generation of PCIe Gen4 products, we have had a year-and-a-half lead with our ecosystem partner AMD. I am very excited that our next generation controller E18 will enable our partners to fully utilize the PCIe Gen 4×4 bandwidth and generate 7.4GB/s performance for their customers. We are proud to be leading the way in advancing this technology and we look forward to enhancing it in the years to come, says K.S Pua, CEO of Phison Electronics.