Storage chips are the specific applications of the concept of embedded system chips in the storage industry. Therefore, whether it is a system chip or a storage chip, it is achieved by embedding software in a single chip to achieve multifunctional and high-performance performance, as well as support for multiple protocols, hardware, and applications.
Operation mode
For the storage industry, storage chips are mainly productized in two ways:
1. Implementing Storage Chips with ASIC Technology
ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) has been widely used in the storage and network industry. In addition to significantly improving system processing capacity and accelerating product development speed, ASICs are more suitable for products produced in large quantities and complete standardized designs based on fixed requirements. In the storage industry, ASICs are typically used to implement certain functions of storage product technology, serve as accelerators, or alleviate the overall performance degradation of the system caused by excessive CPU load caused by various optimization techniques.
2. FPGA technology implementation of memory chips
FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is the highest level of specialized integrated circuits (ASICs). Compared with ASIC, FPGA can further shorten the design cycle, reduce design costs, and have higher design flexibility. When it is necessary to change the completed design, the redesign time of ASICs is usually calculated in months, while the redesign time of FPGA is calculated in hours. This gives FPGA an unparalleled market response speed compared to other technology platforms.
The new generation of FPGA has outstanding characteristics of low power consumption, fast and fast (most tools are calculated in picoseconds to tens of billionths of a second). At the same time, manufacturers can reconfigure FPGA functional modules and I/O modules, and can also program them online to achieve system online reconstruction. This enables FPGA to build a real-time customized soft core processor based on computing tasks. Moreover, there is no limit to the functionality of FPGA, which can be either a storage controller or a processor. The new generation FPGA supports a variety of hardware, with programmable I/O, IP (intellectual property), and multiple processor cores. These comprehensive advantages have led to FPGA being applied by some storage manufacturers in the development of fully functional storage chip architectures.
Main applications
Storage chip technology is mainly focused on the application of enterprise level storage systems, providing high-quality support for access performance, storage protocols, management platforms, storage media, and various applications. With the rapid growth of data and the increasing importance of data to business, the data storage market is rapidly evolving. From DAS, NAS, SAN to virtual data centers, cloud computing, all pose great challenges to traditional storage design capabilities.
For storage and data disaster recovery, virtualization, data protection, data security (encryption), data compression, Data deduplication, thin provisioning and other functions are increasingly becoming the standard functions of solutions. Managing more data with fewer resources is becoming an inevitable trend in the market. However, all of the optimization functions mentioned above require a significant amount of CPU resources. How to quickly achieve a multifunctional productization process and ensure the high performance of the optimized system is the market driving force for the development of storage chips.
The storage chip can quickly integrate various storage functions into a single chip, ensuring the high performance of the optimized system. This advantage will gradually make the storage chip an ideal technology platform for online storage, near-line storage, and remote disaster recovery.
Development prospects
The Future Value of Storage Chips
SoC with various processor cores and FPGA products with integrated processing capabilities will play an important role in an increasing number of embedded systems. For the dynamically changing storage market, using FPGA to implement embedded solutions can customize and implement its system processing capabilities, peripheral circuits, and storage interfaces, and quickly improve its core competitiveness. FPGA also has great advantages in design flexibility. FPGA, usually called "soft core processor hardware accelerator", will greatly improve system performance. The storage chip architecture implemented through FPGA will trigger a change in the competitive landscape of mid to high-end storage through the improvement of product research and development capabilities.
