A new generation of high-performance, low-power storage devices for Edge computing...

Modern embedded applications process huge amounts of data coming from various types of sensors, such as high resolution cameras, testbench recorders for industrial analytics or data acquisition in a physics experiment. This data must be stored in a local device with small latency to access. In addition, with limited budgets for bill of material, power consumption and space,the storage device should have low cost.

Data storage devices could be built in the devices like serial flash memory or eMMC, or on removable support, like SDCard, USB media or mSATA SSD. However, these types of devices don’t support enough throughput for some applications, for example, a high resolution video. The new, more efficient NVMe storage devices based on the PCIe interface, provide much higher throughput, but they also require higher CPU utilization and power consumption, which is critical for embedded applications.

The motivation of the design of a new type of storage device is to provide high bandwidth with low power consumption, which is the main pain point of the modern embedded storage solutions. We are designing a storage memory which could use only the SDRAM interface and provides high throughput, similar to PCIe devices, but consumes less power. Thus, the technology would fill a gap between low performance SD-cards and high power NVMe SSDs. The storage device works on existing DDR4/DDR5 memory busses, using standard memory controllers. The memory module would be designed either as on-board memory or as a NVDIMM module.

The storage devices could be used in different types of embedded systems, from military to consumer electronics, that require intensive processing data. For some types of computer systems and applications, which use sequential READ or WRITE operations, for example high definition video or VR systems, the speed of storing or accessing data would exceed the speed of server-class SSDs.

The technical ideas used in the technology are innovative and protected by granted patents, US 11,055,220 and US 11,526,441.