Known primarily for controllers designed for inexpensive SATA SSDs, Maxio Technology is now expanding into the space of higher-performance drives featuring a PCIe interface. At Computex, the company demonstrated its MAP1000 lineup of PCIe SSD controllers aimed at cheaper (as well as higher-end) solutions.

Maxio’s family of PCIe SSD controllers includes three chips: the MAP1001 with 8 NAND channels for advanced drives, the MAP1003 with 4 NAND channels for mainstream SSDs, and the MAP1002 with 4 NAND channels for the cheapest DRAM-less solutions. As far as compatibility is concerned, the Maxio MAP1000-series controllers can work with various types of 3D MLC/3D TLC/3D QLC memory from different manufacturers and feature a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface.

When it comes to performance, Maxio says that drives powered by the MAP1001 will offer up to 3.5 GB/s sequential read speed, up to 3 GB/s sequential write speed, up to 800K read IOPS, and up to 600K read IOPS when used with 3D NAND ICs featuring a 800 MT/s interface. SSDs based on other controllers will be tangibly slower (at up to 2.4 GB/s sequential read speed), but will still outpace SATA drives by a very considerable margin.

On the feature side of things, the controllers feature Maxio’s AgileECC 2 technology (think 2^nd generation implementation of its LDPC-based technology); embedded RAID capabilities; end-to-end data protection; AES-256, TCG-OPAL 2.0, and China-specific SM2, SM3, and SM4 encoding; advanced power management, and so on. All the controllers are made using a 28 nm process technology, so the chips are not too expensive to manufacture (just look at their dimensions).

Maxio’s customers will test the company’s MAP1001 and MAP1002 controllers in the third quarter and at least some of them will be able to roll out commercial drives on their base sometimes late this year or early in 2020.

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