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Altera® programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Altera offers FPGA, SoC, CPLD, and complementary technologies, such as power solutions to provide high-value solutions to customers worldwide. Visit Altera at www.altera.com.

who's who in DSD? - Altera

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com - July 2015

The enterprise SSD market couldn't have developed the way it did without a cost effective and competitie FPGA ecosystem.

FPGA's have been an integral part of most of the world's best known large scale enterprise and embedded SSD drives and systems.

But Altera was late in entering the SSD controller market with an integrated flash controller design of its own.

That only happened in June 2015 - the same month it agreed to be aquired by Intel.

This classic guide surveys data integrity architectures in every type of flash and RAM SSD and discusses how they reduce the risk of data corruption from data in flight during unplanned power loss.

Surviving SSD sudden power loss

If you could only get 3 messages to the most important people in your industry to help them understand your view of the market what would they be?

the SSD Bookmarks

The enterprise flash story... why is the plot so tangled?

The enterprise flash story...

A lot has been written about it. But have you ever wondered - why did the plot get so complicated? And have you seen some of the recent episodes? Many of these new characters just aren't believable. But the SSD startup scriptwriters keep adding new heroes and villains and twists.

Which got me thinking. Was there ever a best past time to simplify the whole series? And was there ever a heroic golden age of enterprise SSD? By which I mean - when was the most exciting episode at which to get started? ...read the article

A to Z
SSD history
what's the state of DWPD?
Capacitor hold up times in 2.5" military SSDs
latency loving reasons for fading out DRAM in the virtual memory mix

Altera launches adaptive controller for PCIe SSD market

and Intel's acquisition of Altera from an SSD view

Editor:- June 23, 2015 - Altera today announced availability of a new flash controller reference design for the NVMe PCIe SSD market which uses adaptive writes and DSP ECC. The Arria 10 SoC (pdf) which includes among other things an integrated dual-core ARM processor uses flash IP from Mobiveil and NAND optimization software from NVMdurance to simplify the design of gen 3 PCIe SSDs having 7x better endurance than classical non adaptive designs.

Editor's comments:- Since the market criticality of adaptive DSP flash controller techniques for enterprise SSDs started to emerge in 2011 and then clarified in a big way in 2012 - it has become an essential capability for most product lines. This standard product from Altera fills a much needed gap in their offerings.

how will Intel's acquisition of Altera affect SSD market?

Earlier this month:- Intel announced it had agreed to acquire Altera for $16.7 billion.

I don't think it will change any of the fundamental technology directions in the SSD market. But I did discuss it with some readers who asked me about related issues. Here are some extracts from what I said in various emails.

The Altera acquisition makes perfect business sense - because Intel had lost out on many big markets (such as mobile phones etc) due to its unwillingness to design custom solutions for specific systems.

Intel's inability to make that kind of business work (where the customer leads the architecture) was demonstrated back in the late 1980s with their ASIC business which was based on gate array technology which they obtained from IBM in return for rights for IBM to design custom X86 processors.

Unfortunately the IBM ASIC technology was unwieldy and less well supported by low cost EDA tools than many of the competitive offerings from pure play gate array and standard cell companies. So the ASIC technology was unattractive outside a small core customer base - and soon fizzled out. - But IBM got to keep the more valuable rights to the X86.

And like other market lessons where Intel experimented but got burned (such as the digital watch and DRAM) that lesson remained imprinted in future Intel management culture - that there are some markets which Intel should avoid participtaing in with market specific silicon products:-

those which have the potential to be commodities (like memory) and

those which require high degrees of customization and custom architecture for one specific product or customer and where Intel's architecture and legacy software ecosystems are not the central themes of the product.

Altera provides a way of market customization via a standard product.

And FPGAs from Altera and other companies are widely used within enterprise SSD systems and also within low to medium volume embedded SSD drives too.

Therefore this acquisition - which gives Intel a market leading reprogrammable controller platform - will enable marketers and technologists in Intel to stick to the comfortable concept of predictable semiconductor geometry based roadmaps - while also having an engagement within the SSD market and visibility of trends which goes much wider than their previous product lines enabled.

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