Silicon Motion is developing a next-gen PCIe 6.0 SSD controller

Silicon Motion is already developing its first SSD controller for drives with a PCIe 6.0 interface. The new controller is called SM8466 and belongs to the MonTitan family of SSD controllers for datacenters and enterprise. 

Wallace C. Kou, chief executive of Silicon Motion made the short announcement of the company’s inaugural PCIe 6.0 SSD controller in his column for ChinaFlashMarket.com. The CEO of SMI did not reveal many details about the company’s SM8466 PCIe Gen6 SSD controller, though we can make an educated guess that the chip will feature a PCIe 6.0 x4 interface and will aim for an up to 30.25 GB/s bandwidth in each direction, a 2X performance increase compared to drives with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Obviously, since we are dealing with a Mon Titan controller — and based on the naming scheme, we are indeed dealing with enterprise-oriented silicon — expect it to feature all the enterprise-grade security capabilities. 

One of the interesting questions about Silicon Motion’s Mon Titan SM8466 controller is which process technology SMI plans to use for its manufacturing. The company has never revealed the manufacturing process of its SM8366 controller introduced in 2022, though its client-oriented SM2508 PCIe 5.0 x4 controller — which powers some of the best SSDs — that is entering the market these days uses TSMC’s N6 (6nm-class) fabrication process. In any case, the new SM2466 is poised to use a new production node and therefore pack more processing cores, which will enable better performance, features, and enhanced compatibility with next-generation 3D TLC and 3D QLC types of NAND memory.

At this point, we have no idea whether Silicon Motion’s development of its first PCIe 6.0 x4 controller is at the early stages of development or further along. In any case, the very mention of the project indicates that the work is in progress, so expect SMI-based drives with a PCIe 6.0 x4 interface in the future. 

Silicon Motion is somewhat behind its main competitor with its PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers. Phison was ahead of the whole industry with its PS5026-E26 controller with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. While the chip was initially used for client drives, it was designed to power both client and datacenter SSDs. As a result, the E26 competes against SMI’s MonTitan SM8366 which is a more powerful controller positioned to fight for the higher-end of the enterprise market.