Kraftway ASIC SSD

Main article: SSD - Solid-State Drive

2022: ASIC v1

On July 8, 2022, it became known that the company Kraftway announced (SSDs solid state drive,), SSD built on the basis of a domestic controller. The chip is called K1942VK018.

Kraftway has announced an SSD based on a domestic controller. Photo: academy.avast.com.

As of July 2022, SSD drives built on the K1942VK018 work in various systems assembled on domestic Elbrus processors from MCST.

The developer showed the first generation ASIC v1 drive built on K1942VK018. This controller is manufactured using a 28-nanometer process technology - it is produced by the Taiwanese company TSMC. In February 2022, this vendor ceased to cooperate with Baikal Electronics and ICST to please American sanctions against Russia. It is possible that the restrictions also affected Kraftway.

As of July 2022, it is impossible to produce K1942VK018 in Russia - the country does not have the equipment necessary for this. The controller supports eight memory channels, as well as LDPC decoding, RAID arrays, plus the ability to monitor and manage power.

The Kraftway catalog has two SSDs - ASIC v1 and ASIC v2. Both are made in the form of a PCI-E 4.0 expansion card. SSD drives of this form factor are rarely used in desktop PCs, and in some of them, for example, in nettops, there is no place for them at all.

The developers assured that the K1942VK018 can be used in SSDs of various formats, including the M.2 most in demand by users - these modules are used in desktop PCs and laptops, and portable storage media are also assembled on their basis. Power consumption in case of K1942VK018 does not exceed 4 W.

The Kraftway SSD duet is represented by one base and one top model. The line opens the drive ASIC v1 in the form of an HHHL board, which the developer equips with 2D MLC and 3D MLC flash memory modules, depending on the modification. A version with pMLC is also available.

ASIC v1 is connected via PCI-E 4.0 x4 and can hold up to 2 TB of information. Due to the selected connection interface, it works faster than classic SATA drives, giving 830 MB/s and 680 MB/s when reading and writing, respectively. The drive has up to 55,000 write IOPS and 65,000 read IOPS.

ASIC v2 has the following characteristics: its performance is at 200,000 IOPS (read) and 150,000 IOPS (write), and the speed of operation is 1500 MB/s for reading and writing. This is achieved, among other things, through the PCI-E 4.0 x4 interface.

The capacity of ASIC v2 reaches 16 GB. The memory modules used are 3D MLC, TLC and QLC NAND.

ASIC v2 and ASIC v1 use flash memory from foreign vendors along with the Russian controller manufactured in Taiwan. Depending on the modification, production modules can be soldered on the board, and the Japanese Kioxia the AmericanMicron. the Chinese YMTC

The copies of drives shown during the announcement use the memory of the Russian company GS Nanotech. But it is still made from Micron and Kioxia chips.

The cost of the drives was not disclosed by the time the material was released. Kraftway intends to establish serial production of its controllers in 2023. The release of chips is likely to be carried out by the Chinese YMTC, a contract with which has already been concluded.

YMTC has at its disposal the only plant in Wuhan (China) capable of producing up to 100 thousand 300-mm silicon wafers per month. As of July 2022, the company is building a second factory in the same city, which should open by the end of 2022 and ensure the production of another 200 thousand such plates per month.

According to the developers, the presented samples of first-generation drives install NAND-flash memory chips manufactured by the Russian GS Nanotech, which contain Micron and Kioxia crystals. The drive uses the PCIe x4 gen.2 interface (hardware implementation of NVMe 1.2), and the maximum capacity reaches 2 TB. Sequential read/write speed exceeds 800 MB/s

All stages of development of the solid-state drive controller microcircuit: creation of a mathematical model, design of architecture and operation algorithms, development of all main IP blocks and interfaces, implementation from prototype to physical design - were carried out in Russia.

The development of ASIC v1 lasted four years from the end of 2015 to the end of 2019. Foreign specialists were not involved. Mathematical algorithms and the SSD core were developed with the involvement of researchers at Moscow State University. Some of the peripheral and internal IP blocks were developed by Kraftway specialists.

The production of solid-state drives is carried out at the Kraftway plant in Obninsk. Serial production of the first generation of controller chips was suspended after the release of the first batch, since the price of MLC memory in terms of 1 GB is several times higher than TLC, which ASIC v1 does not support^[1].

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