During the last A3 Communications Technology Live! in London, I’ve got the opportunity to meet FADU and know more about their product and their business model.

FADU is a fabless semiconductor company innovating flash storage technology and supply chain, that is supplying eSSDcontrollers to multiple NAND partner.

Actually three generations of controllers are in mass production :

But what makes FADU’s controller unique? They have high performance scalability from programmable control plane, intrinsic power efficiency and great QoS!

Typical SSD controller have challenges scaling and needs a lots of Arm cores to scale performance. FADU instead of using ARM CPU is using RISC-V:

With RISC-V cores, is not only possible have a better energy efficiency, but also:

• Deep Pipeline: NVMe commands are processed in a multi-stage pipeline, where each stage is handled by a dedicated Packet Processing Unit (PPU) core.
• Increased Throughput: Pipelining allows multiple commands to be processed concurrently at different stages, significantly increasing the overall command throughput.
• Improved efficiency: By breaking down the processing into smaller stages, can solve bottlenecks to scaling.

And FADU’s roadmap is very interesting including a new controller for PCIe 6.0 and some CXL products:

The new Sierra PCIe 6.0 SSD controller will provide full PCIe 6.0 performance (>28GB/s) with up to 2x better power efficiency compared with Fadu gen 5 products (over 2GB/s per W), support for new NVMe2.1 features, support SLC, TLC, and QLC up to 256TB and some virtualization enhancements (SRIOV, MFND, ATS).