The new Phison E18 (PS5018-E18) SSD controller is the first PCIe-Gen4-x4 controller to achieve a read and write speed of over 7 GByte/s. In contrast to its predecessor, the Phison E16, which was manufactured using the 28 nm process, the new Phison E18 is produced in a 12 nm structure width.
The NVMe 1.4 protocol and four PCIe Gen4 lanes are used. To increase the speed even further, the controller supports (LP)DDR4 memory as a buffer. This is used for the mapping table. The maximum NAND capacity is 8 TByte.
Flash memory with three bit (TLC) or four bit (QLC) per cell can be addressed. The speed for sequential reading is 7.4 GByte/s and 7.0 GByte/s for sequential writing. The predecessor Phison E16 reached “only” 5 GByte/s reading and 4.4 GByte/s writing. The high data rates of the Phison E18 apply exclusively to the SLC buffer. The input/output operations per second (IOPS) are now at one million, the predecessor only reached 750k.
