Silicon Motion has introduced its new single-chip controller for external solid-state drives that is designed to enable relatively inexpensive SSDs with a 40 Gb/s USB4 interface. The SM2324 controller can be used to build compact, low-power drives with up to 32TB capacity that offer a read throughput up to 4,000 MB/s.
Silicon Motion's SM2324 is a single-chip SSD controller based on two Arm Cortex-R5 cores that has four NAND channels with 32 CE targets that support 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND devices with an up to 1,600 MT/s interface speed as well as a USB4 Gen3x2 (40 Gbps) host interface with Power Delivery 3.1. SMI claims that drives based on the SM2324 controller can achieve a sequential read performance of up to 4,000 MB/s and a sequential write performance of up to 3,809 MB/s (provided that there is enough cooling). The controller can address up to 32 TB of memory, which enables it to be used both for consumer and professional-grade external storage devices.
