Microchip Technology has launched the FlashTec NVMe 5016 Solid State Drive (SSD) controller, a product developed to provide increased bandwidth, security, and flexibility. Considering the recent expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based services, which in turn accelerated the need for data centres to be more optimised, Microchip released a 16-channel, PCIe Gen 5 NVM Express (NVMe) controller to provide higher levels of bandwidth, safety, and flexibility.

In addition, the Flashtec NVMe 5016 controller was developed to support enterprise applications, including online transaction processing, financial data processing, database mining, and other applications, that are usually sensitive to latency and performance. Also, the product aims to serve AI needs with increased reading and writing of large data sets leveraged in model training and inference processing, delivering the bandwidth required to transfer large volumes of data between storage and compute resources. More on Microchip’s product and its capabilities The NVMe 5016 controller focuses on maximising compute resource usage in traditional and AI-accelerated servers under demanding workloads, with the product having a sequential read performance of more than 14 GB per second.

Moreover, Microchip designed the product to have a high random read performance of 3.5M IOs per second and a power profile focused on power-sensitive data centre requirements, offering over 2.5 GB of data per watt. The NVMe 5016 controller leverages node technologies and includes power management capabilities, such as automatic idling of processor cores and autonomous power minimisation features. Furthermore, with the launch, Microchip intends to allow users to reduce the total cost of ownership as virtualisation capabilities, including single root I/O virtualisation (SR-IOV), multiple physical functions, and several functions per physical function, maximise the PCIe resource utilisation. In addition, the product was embedded with security features to maintain the integrity of both firmware and data throughout its lifecycle.

These capabilities include Secure Boot with hardware Root-of-Trust, dual signature authentication to facilitate system OEM and end-user verification. .