Chandler, Arizona-based Microchip Technology Inc, recently announced the expansion of its serial attached memory controller line of products with the introduction of the SMC 2000 series of Compute Express Link (CXL) based smart memory controllers. The controllers are often used on CPUs, GPUs and SoCs to utilise the CXL interface to connect DDR4 or DDR5 memories and deliver increased memory bandwidth, and memory capacity per core and can potentially lower the overall cost of ownership by allowing modern CPUs to optimise workloads.
“This is our first CXL-based serial memory controller device to be introduced to the market,” said Pete Hazen, corporate vice president of Microchip’s Data Center Solutions business unit. “We identified CXL as a disruptive technology early on and were integral to the standard’s definition. Microchip’s continued presence in the memory infrastructure market underscores our commitment to improving performance and efficiency for a broad range of SoC applications to support the increasing memory requirements of high-performance data centre applications.”
“The CXL Consortium has the aim to deliver to the industry an open standard that accelerates next-generation data centre performance,” explained Siamak Tavallaei, president, of CXL Consortium. “We’re pleased to see Microchip, a valuable contributor to the CXL Consortium, deliver a CXL solution enabling a new ecosystem for high-performance, heterogeneous computing.”
Microchip’s SMC 2000 CXL memory controllers are based on a design that claims to deliver Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) which promises higher levels of performance and efficiency. Via the technology and CXL connectivity, SMC 2000 external memory controller facilitates a CPU or SoC to operate a broad set of media types with different expense, power and performance metrics without having to integrate a distinctive memory controller for different types. A dual signature trusted platform and authentication support, secure firmware update and debugging claim to assure that the SMC 2000 CXL-based controllers also meet all vital storage and business application security parameters.
