Two Major Enterprise SSD Vendors License Arteris FlexNoC Interconnect IP

Arteris, Inc., inventor and supplier of silicon-proven commercial network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP solutions, announced that two of the world’s largest enterprise SSD vendors have licensed its FlexNoC fabric IP for use as the communications backbone within their upcoming SSD controller SoCs.

The enterprise SSD market is going through a shift where a number of innovative companies are bringing their controller chip design in-house rather than relying on third-party suppliers. A complicating factor is the high bandwidth requirements for moving large blocks of data very quickly, creating extreme routing congestion and timing closure issues.

FlexNoC’s network-on-chip technology alleviates these back end bottlenecks by packetizing data and serializing its transmission over fewer wires than required with inferior fabric technologies. Using FlexNoC simultaneously shortens design schedules and shrinks die size, increasing the profitability potential for these enterprise SSD vendors.

In addition to the schedule and cost savings,

Arteris FlexNoC has helped these companies by providing:

• On-chip data protection: Enterprise SSD controllers must protect data contents not only within processing units and memories, but also in all on-chip communications between them. FlexNoC IP’s ECC and parity data protection make it easy to set up, test and check the composition of on-chip data flows in real time. And it natively supports the ARM Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 processor ECC and parity data protection schemes. Additional data protection features such as redundancy / duplication and built-in system checking (BIST) are also available with the optional FlexNoC Resilience Package.
• High bandwidth, low latency for PCIe: Enterprise SSD controllers have unique requirements for high bandwidth and low latency block transfers to make the most efficient use of on-chip PCIe controllers. FlexNoC has the most QoS configuration options of commercially available fabric IP, allowing performance for these unique requirements.
• Fast SoC assembly: Using FlexNoC is a fast way for these companies to assemble sophisticated semiconductor systems. Built-in simulation and verification made it possible for these design teams to validate engineering decisions, enabling them to make tailored controller solutions that perform better than previous merchant controllers.

“The enterprise SSD market has quickly grown in sophistication and complexity, making it a perfect match for the use of Arteris FlexNoC interconnect IP,” said K. Charles Janac, president and CEO, Arteris. “We are proud that these two leading companies have chosen Arteris to help them implement their own state-of-the-art SSD controllers in less time for less cost, taking advantage of FlexNoC’s unmatched data protection, QoS and SoC assembly features.”