XITC and SMIC launched the autonomous controllable AI SSD controller XT6160

On October 21, China's leading solid-state storage main control chip and solution provider Xinsheng Intelligence joined hands with China's integrated circuit manufacturing leader SMIC International to launch the industry's first SATA III (6Gb/s) enterprise-class SSD main control chip - XT6160 series, which supports end-to-end AI reasoning applications.

In order to create a SATA enterprise-class SSD master control chip that meets the demands of domestic autonomous control and has excellent performance, Xinsheng Intelligence and SMIC give full play to their respective technical advantages, reduce leakage current and operating power consumption, improve working environment temperature and engineering application reliability through a series of collaborative optimization efforts of chip circuit design and semiconductor manufacturing process, and achieve substantial benefits. And achieve the design goals of high performance, high reliability, high energy efficiency and high security for enterprise and data center applications.

Independent research and development, domestic production

The XT6160 main control chip is based on SMIC's proven 28 nm HKC+ process, which provides an excellent balance between performance and cost. XT6160 All IP domestic autonomous controllable, Among them, SATA 3.2 Controller, 4KB LDPC, NAND Flash Controller (NFC), AXI Bus, ONFI 4.2 PHY, Business secret algorithm SM2/SM3/SM4 and other core IP are independently developed by Xinsheng Intelligence, and the proportion of self-research exceeds 60%. Other IP are from domestic IP providers, thus realizing the whole process from IP self-research, cooperation (joint domestic IP providers) to chip design, manufacturing, packaging and testing.

RISC-V architecture, independent AI core

As an important member of China Open Instruction Ecology (RISC-V) alliance, Xinsheng Intelligence gathers "core" strength for RISC-V. XT6160 is the first domestic SATA III (6Gb/s) master control with independent AI core launched by Xinsun Intelligence based on RISC-V architecture, and another ingenuity after the launch of the world's first RISC-V architecture, 12nm process PCIe 4.0 master control in 2022.

The AI of the XT6160 checks the working status of the NAND flash block, predicts the optimal read voltage and flash transfer layer (FTL) parameters during the life cycle of the flash block based on ML/AI algorithm, and intelligently manages, calibrates, and optimizes the relevant parameters to effectively improve SSD read and write performance, life, reliability, and energy efficiency.

The independent AI core architecture and open capability of XT6160 not only help improve SSD specifications, but also provide various possibilities for industrial applications of computational storage, such as lossless data compression optimization based on ML/AI processing can improve the compression hit rate and reduce the delay; By linking with the host CPU, the XT6160's independent AI nuclear energy shares some processing tasks that are not high in real-time requirements and require little computation, such as the energy consumption of computing equipment and the battery power supply system.

Excellent performance, wide temperature design

XT6160 is designed based on 8-channel 32 CE flash memory interface, supports 800MT/s channel interface rate, ADAPTS to the latest 3D TLC/QLC particles of mainstream flash memory manufacturers, and supports the design of a single disk capacity of up to 16TB. With self-developed NFC Acc and Bufman hardware acceleration, 128KB sequential read/write performance is up to 565/530 MB/s, and 4KB steady state random read/write performance is up to 98K/60K IOPS, which is better than similar products in the industry. In addition, through QoS quality control technology, read and write performance consistency can be maintained at more than 95%, providing continuous and stable performance guarantee for users.

Considering the complex environment of different application scenarios, the design target of XT6160 operating temperature is determined to be -40℃ to 125℃. Through the collaborative optimization of chip design and production line process, the process means including adaptive voltage regulation (AVS) technology is researched and applied to reduce chip power consumption. Improve product life and reliability at 85 ° C, 105 ° C, and even 125 ° C ultra-high temperature environments.

Green energy saving, a core multi-purpose

XT6160 adopts clock gate, multi-voltage domain and other low power design, running power consumption does not exceed 1.5W (DRAM cache mode) or 0.8W (no DRAM cache mode), and integrates E2E data protection, ECC/LDPC/RAID data error correction, PLP power failure protection and other data reliability assurance technologies. In the premise of ensuring low power consumption, the data error correction and power failure protection are effectively improved. With excellent performance indicators, the XT6160 series of master control products are widely used in a variety of solid-state storage application scenarios, such as enterprise high performance, industrial high reliability, and industrial high security.

Data security throughout the life cycle

XT6160 is designed according to the second-level standard specification of security chip of National Cryptography Administration, with logical and physical security active protection measures, effectively resist the cracking means of physical slice, probe, reverse engineering, etc., to protect the physical security of the chip itself; During the startup and operation of the chip, load and run the legitimate and trusted firmware through the check mode to prevent illegal firmware tampering and ensure the safety of the chip. The chip integrates the domestic commercial cryptographic algorithm SM2/SM3/SM4 and the international cryptographic algorithm AES256 hardware acceleration engine, providing full life cycle encryption and decryption security protection for user data, and almost does not affect SSD performance, effectively ensuring data and information storage security.

The SATA enterprise-class SSD main control chip XT6160 released this time is a new achievement of Xinsheng Intelligence's strategy of "solid State Storage China Core". Forge ahead, Xinsheng Intelligent will join hands with industry chain partners to make greater contributions to the storage industry.