July 28 2014 Issue 126
Interview withMichael Kuhn (right) VP amp Business Line Executive and Kevin Powell (left) Program DirectorIBM Flash Systems
IBMFlash Systems
Turn Datainto Dollars
Deep Machine Learning and the Google Brain
DeepCover Secure Authenticators
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Join Today
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10
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24
32
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DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
To read the previous installment
click the image above
Alex Lidow
CEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the
advantages of eGaNreg FETs
employed in a traditional voltage-
mode class D and class E wireless
energy transfer were presented
In this installment a zero-voltage-
switching (ZVS) variation of the
voltage-mode class D amplifier will
be presented for highly resonant
loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band
wireless energy transfer that will
further show how eGaN FETs
enable new topologies with
dramatic improvements in
efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMS
Many wireless energy-transfer topology
solutions have focused on the benefits that a
particular topology offers at a specific operating
point In reality wireless energy systems
experience large coupling and load variations
that result in undesirable operating conditions
for some topologies Many high-frequency
high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of
resonance to establish soft-switching conditions
for the devices to yield high efficiency However
deviations from the ideal operating conditions
for these resonant-based topologies quickly
lead to nonideal operating conditions for the
devices with associated increase in losses The
class E topology is one that is particularly prone
to load variations as changes in the load lead to
reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting
in significant losses in the switching device as
it partially loses the zero voltage switching-
operating condition For the voltage-mode class
D topology the same condition leads to reduced
current in the amplifier with corresponding
lower losses in the devices This feature of the
voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate
for wireless energy systems However due to the
output capacitance of the switching devices it
has traditionally been operated above resonance
[3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing
it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-
current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation
of the voltage-mode class D is presented that
overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier
coil set with device-side matching as shown in
figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance
parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This
allows the discussion of the topology to focus
of the amplifier itself and how various operating
conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY
The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in
figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the
switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit
(LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate
the switch node This part of the circuit operates
as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless
switching for the devices without the need to
establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by
resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal
current for loading the amplifier The peak of the
load current does not coincide with the peak of
the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two
components of the circuit operate well together
and without significantly increasing device-
conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified
representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with
ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-
frequency
high-efficiency
topologies
make use of
resonance
to establish
soft-switching
conditions for
the devices
to yield high
efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
FEATURED PRODUCTSThis weeks latest products from EEWeb
TECH ARTICLEDeep Machine Learning and the Google Brain Artificilal Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
TECH ARTICLEMaxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
TECH ARTICLEHow to GaN Stable and Efficient ZVS Class D Wireless Energy Transfer at 678MHz
COVER INTERVIEWIBM Flash Systems Turn Data into Dollars Michael Kuhn and Kevin Powell IBM Flash Systems
FEATURED ARTICLEIBMrsquos Enterprise Flash Calms Sea of Data for Next-Generation Data Centers
TECH TRENDHigh-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
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Multioutput WLEDRGB Backlight DriverThe A8516 is Allegrorsquos multi-output WLEDRGB LED driver IC released since 2010 This LED driver is intended for backlighting LCD monitors and televisions It incorporates a boost controller to drive external MOSFET and six internal current sinks It features a fixed frequency current mode control with integrated gate driver The LED sink cur-rent is set by an external R_ISET resistor More than one LED sinks can be combined together to achieve even higher current per LED stringRead More
450 W DIN Rail-Mount Power SupplyThe PMK450S-12D is DIN rail mount power supply packaged in an enclosed construction This supply is capable of delivering up to 450 W of rated power and possess a power factor correction (PFC) function Output characteristics of the device includes a voltage output of 12 V and current output of 375 A Efficiency of the model reaches up to 85 with a guaranteed effective operation at the ex-tended temperature range of -40 to +85ordmC The PMK450S-12D is equipped with over current over temperature over voltage and short circuit protectionRead More
MMF Transceiver with Digital Diagnostic Avagorsquos AFBR-57J7APZ optical transceiver supports high speed serial links over multimode optical fiber at signaling rates up to 74 Gbs for wireless base station applications involving the OBSAI or CPRI protocols as well as related applications The transceiver is compliant with Small Form Pluggable (SFP) multi-source agree-ments INF8074 and SFF-8472 for mechanical and electrical specifcations and FOCISIEC specifications for optical duplex LC connectorsRead More
TASKING ISO 26262 Support ProgramAutomotive systems safety issues compound when numerous systems must interoperate while providing passenger comfort and features Embedded software forms a critical path in systems such as Driver Assistance Propulsion I n-Vehicle Dynamics and Active and Passive Safety Devices To mitigate the compounding safety risks associated with these embedded systems the ISO 26262 standard provides guidance along with requirements and processes for testing and certifying automotive embedded software and development tools for safetyRead More
192 kHz Digital Audio TransmitterThe CS8406 is a digital audio interface transmitter with featuring complete EIAJ CP1201 IEC-60958 AES3 SPDIF-compatible transmitter It has on-chip channel status and flexible 3-wire serial digital audio input port With frame rates up to 192 kHz and an on-chip differential line driverThe CS8406 is a digital audio transmitter that enables consumer and professional audio products to exchange 192 kHz SPDIF and AESEBU audio data The CS8406 accepts and encodes audio and digital data which is then multiplexed encoded and driven onto a cableoptical transmission interfaceRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
RFID Transponder CoilsThe 4312 Series are RFID transponder coils for RFID applications at 125 kHz It is designed to withstand the harshest mechanical shock and high temperatures and developed for tire pressure monitoring systemsThe coil is wound on a plastic base providing great durability and allowing this part to withstand physical shock With operating temperature range to 125degC these parts pass AEC-200 Grade 1 (-40degC to +125degC) qualification and are ideal for use in a wide range of automotive applications The uniquely shaped termination provides excellent board adhesionRead More
Development Tools for Embedded ProcessorsDigi-Key Corporation announced a global distribution agreement with Sauris GmBH Sauris GmBH manufactures development kits and tools of C200050006000 DaVinci Sitara OMAP and ARM processors from Texas Instruments It offers low cost and reliable platforms that leverages Texas Instrumentsrsquo processors and provides a promising addition to their broad product offeringSauris GmbH based in Munich Germany designs develops and manufactures hardware development tools for digital signal processors and microcontrollers and application specific devicesRead More
High-Voltage SPICE Models LaunchedIn the past high voltage (HV) discrete device and product development consisted of a long serial approach where technologies were developed in TCAD physical parts fabricated and packaged measurements performed and an iterative calibra-tion cycle launchedAs designers simulate application circuits with SPICE and not TCAD application simu-lations are often performed and calibrated very late in the technology development process when the silicon-based SPICE model is finally availableRead More
166 MHz Coral Q DeviceThe MB86293 ldquoCoral Qrdquo features display resolutions up to 1024times768 and 6-layers of overlay display (windows) and geometry processors It has and RGB digital and analog output with built-in alpha blending anti-aliasing and Chroma keyingThe new Coral device family offers an increased internal operating frequency of 166MHz a 64-bit memory bus support for six independent layers advanced alpha-blending features and enhanced video input facilitiesRead More
New Voltage Options for Rad Hard Family Intersil Corporation has expanded its line of radiation hardened (rad hard) voltage references with the addition of four new devices the ISL71091SEH10 20 33 and 40 These new devices offer better overall accuracy for 11-bit and 12-bit ADC resolution applications The ISL71091SEH family features industryrsquos best output voltage noise and a reference voltage that is stable over time temperature and ionizing radia-tion providing increased precision in satellite data acquisition signal processing and power management applicationsRead More
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4V Output Solar CellThe CPC1824 is a 4-V output solar cell providing wireless power and features replacement of discrete components It is wave solderable and does not generate EMIRFI interferencesThe CPC1824 is a monolithic photovoltaic string of solar cells on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) This patented design allows for higher voltage solar cells in a compact package When operating in sunlight or a bright artificial light environment the optical energy will activate the cell array and generate a voltage at the outputRead More
Quartz-Filled Two-Part Epoxy SystemThe EP30QF is two-part quartz filled epoxy system designed for high performance bonding sealing coating and casting This material is formulated to cure at room temperature or more rapidly at elevated temperatures with a 4-to-1 mix ratio by weight The suggested cure schedule for this system is overnight at room tempera-ture and followed by one to two hours at 150-200 ordmF to achieve optimization of its properties This adhesive is 100 reactive and does not contain any solvents or other volatiles It is especially recommended where high tensile modulus outstanding compressive strength and superior dimensional stability are important requirements Linear shrinkage after cure is exceptionally low A lower viscosity version called EP30QFLV is also availableRead More
ISDB-T 1-Segment TunerThe MAX2163 is an ISDB-T tuner that has a supply voltage range of 24 VDC to 347 VDC and incorporating a 2-wire serial I2C digital input with clock frequency of 400 kHz The devicersquo main signal path performance includes a maximum voltage gain of 96 dB and a noise figure of 32 dB to 53 dBThe MAX2163 low-IF tuner IC is designed for use in 1-segment ISDB-T applications The MAX2163 directly converts UHF band signals to a low-IF using a broadband IQ downconverter The operating frequency range covers the UHF band from 470MHz to 806MHzRead More
868915 MHz ASK TransmitterThe TH72032 is an 868-915-MHz ASK transmitter integrated circuit featuring a fully integrated PLL-stabilized VCO and a single-ended RF output It features a very low standby current and over-all frequency accuracyThe TH72032 ASK transmitter IC is designed for applications in the European 868 MHz industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) band according to the EN 300 220 telecommuni-cations standard It can also be used for any other system with carrier frequencies ranging from 850 MHz to 930 MHz (eg for applications in the US 902 to 928 MHz ISM band)Read More
Zero Drift Instrumentation Amplifier Microchip Technology expanded its portfolio for instrumentation amplifiers with the addition of its new zero-drift MCP6N16 This device has a self-correcting architecture that extends DC performance by enabling ultra-low offset low-offset drift and superior common-mode and power-supply rejection while eliminating the adverse effects of 1f noise resulting to a very high accuracy across both time and temperatureRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
Compact Constant Current DCDC LED DriversThe LD24-xx-xxx is a series of Wide Input DCDC Constant Current LED Drivers that offers six models available now on the market These has an input voltage range of 70 ~ 300 Vdc and output voltage range of 20 ~ 280 Vdc With an output current accuracy of plusmn60 the devices have efficiency of 95 All models in the series comes up with PWM and analog dimming control Operating Temperature range of the device is from -40 to +85 degrees CelsciusRead More
NUC Atomtrade E3815 Board amp KitMouser Electronics Inc announced the availability of the next unit of computing with the Intel Atom E3815 Processor with board features of fanless design and an internal support for 25rdquo HDD or SSD It has built-in wireless antenna and dual back panel USB 20 portsThe Intel NUC with Intel Atom processor E3815 Board and Kit available from Mouser Electronics is a portable yet powerful computer system that is about the size of a paperback novel It features a fanless design and is expandable to up to 8GBytes of DDR3L SO-DIMM RAMRead More
Radial Lead Shield InductorsMurata Power Solutions introduces 1200RS a series of through hole radial lead shielded inductors that effectively operates at temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC The seriesrsquo maximum dc current is at the range of 044-46 A and maximum dc resistance is as low as possible at the range of 23-1500 mΩ There are thirteen (13) models under this family of inductorsRead More
High-Performance HDMIDVI Level ShifterThe PTN3360A is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface or Digital Visual Interface (HDMIDVI) level shifter with inverting Hot Plug Detect (HPD) This device features multiple level shifting such as high speed Transition-minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) level shifting Display Data Channel (DDC) level shifting and Hot Plug Detect (HPD) level shiftingRead More
Low-Voltage Single ComparatorThe NCX2202 is a low voltage single comparator with an open ndash drain output that consumes very low power This device features an internal hysteresis ESD protection rail-to-rail inputoutput performance and operate at a temperature range from -40 ordmC to +85 ordmC The NCX2202 has a very low supply current of 6 μA and is guaranteed to operate at a low voltage of 13 V and is fully operational up to 55 V These characteristics make the device convenient for use in both 30 V and 50 V systemsRead More
8 Visit eewebcom
2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
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PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
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Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
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CONTENTSPULSE
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4
10
16
24
32
38
44
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
To read the previous installment
click the image above
Alex Lidow
CEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the
advantages of eGaNreg FETs
employed in a traditional voltage-
mode class D and class E wireless
energy transfer were presented
In this installment a zero-voltage-
switching (ZVS) variation of the
voltage-mode class D amplifier will
be presented for highly resonant
loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band
wireless energy transfer that will
further show how eGaN FETs
enable new topologies with
dramatic improvements in
efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMS
Many wireless energy-transfer topology
solutions have focused on the benefits that a
particular topology offers at a specific operating
point In reality wireless energy systems
experience large coupling and load variations
that result in undesirable operating conditions
for some topologies Many high-frequency
high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of
resonance to establish soft-switching conditions
for the devices to yield high efficiency However
deviations from the ideal operating conditions
for these resonant-based topologies quickly
lead to nonideal operating conditions for the
devices with associated increase in losses The
class E topology is one that is particularly prone
to load variations as changes in the load lead to
reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting
in significant losses in the switching device as
it partially loses the zero voltage switching-
operating condition For the voltage-mode class
D topology the same condition leads to reduced
current in the amplifier with corresponding
lower losses in the devices This feature of the
voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate
for wireless energy systems However due to the
output capacitance of the switching devices it
has traditionally been operated above resonance
[3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing
it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-
current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation
of the voltage-mode class D is presented that
overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier
coil set with device-side matching as shown in
figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance
parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This
allows the discussion of the topology to focus
of the amplifier itself and how various operating
conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY
The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in
figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the
switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit
(LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate
the switch node This part of the circuit operates
as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless
switching for the devices without the need to
establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by
resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal
current for loading the amplifier The peak of the
load current does not coincide with the peak of
the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two
components of the circuit operate well together
and without significantly increasing device-
conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified
representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with
ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-
frequency
high-efficiency
topologies
make use of
resonance
to establish
soft-switching
conditions for
the devices
to yield high
efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
FEATURED PRODUCTSThis weeks latest products from EEWeb
TECH ARTICLEDeep Machine Learning and the Google Brain Artificilal Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
TECH ARTICLEMaxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
TECH ARTICLEHow to GaN Stable and Efficient ZVS Class D Wireless Energy Transfer at 678MHz
COVER INTERVIEWIBM Flash Systems Turn Data into Dollars Michael Kuhn and Kevin Powell IBM Flash Systems
FEATURED ARTICLEIBMrsquos Enterprise Flash Calms Sea of Data for Next-Generation Data Centers
TECH TRENDHigh-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
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Multioutput WLEDRGB Backlight DriverThe A8516 is Allegrorsquos multi-output WLEDRGB LED driver IC released since 2010 This LED driver is intended for backlighting LCD monitors and televisions It incorporates a boost controller to drive external MOSFET and six internal current sinks It features a fixed frequency current mode control with integrated gate driver The LED sink cur-rent is set by an external R_ISET resistor More than one LED sinks can be combined together to achieve even higher current per LED stringRead More
450 W DIN Rail-Mount Power SupplyThe PMK450S-12D is DIN rail mount power supply packaged in an enclosed construction This supply is capable of delivering up to 450 W of rated power and possess a power factor correction (PFC) function Output characteristics of the device includes a voltage output of 12 V and current output of 375 A Efficiency of the model reaches up to 85 with a guaranteed effective operation at the ex-tended temperature range of -40 to +85ordmC The PMK450S-12D is equipped with over current over temperature over voltage and short circuit protectionRead More
MMF Transceiver with Digital Diagnostic Avagorsquos AFBR-57J7APZ optical transceiver supports high speed serial links over multimode optical fiber at signaling rates up to 74 Gbs for wireless base station applications involving the OBSAI or CPRI protocols as well as related applications The transceiver is compliant with Small Form Pluggable (SFP) multi-source agree-ments INF8074 and SFF-8472 for mechanical and electrical specifcations and FOCISIEC specifications for optical duplex LC connectorsRead More
TASKING ISO 26262 Support ProgramAutomotive systems safety issues compound when numerous systems must interoperate while providing passenger comfort and features Embedded software forms a critical path in systems such as Driver Assistance Propulsion I n-Vehicle Dynamics and Active and Passive Safety Devices To mitigate the compounding safety risks associated with these embedded systems the ISO 26262 standard provides guidance along with requirements and processes for testing and certifying automotive embedded software and development tools for safetyRead More
192 kHz Digital Audio TransmitterThe CS8406 is a digital audio interface transmitter with featuring complete EIAJ CP1201 IEC-60958 AES3 SPDIF-compatible transmitter It has on-chip channel status and flexible 3-wire serial digital audio input port With frame rates up to 192 kHz and an on-chip differential line driverThe CS8406 is a digital audio transmitter that enables consumer and professional audio products to exchange 192 kHz SPDIF and AESEBU audio data The CS8406 accepts and encodes audio and digital data which is then multiplexed encoded and driven onto a cableoptical transmission interfaceRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
RFID Transponder CoilsThe 4312 Series are RFID transponder coils for RFID applications at 125 kHz It is designed to withstand the harshest mechanical shock and high temperatures and developed for tire pressure monitoring systemsThe coil is wound on a plastic base providing great durability and allowing this part to withstand physical shock With operating temperature range to 125degC these parts pass AEC-200 Grade 1 (-40degC to +125degC) qualification and are ideal for use in a wide range of automotive applications The uniquely shaped termination provides excellent board adhesionRead More
Development Tools for Embedded ProcessorsDigi-Key Corporation announced a global distribution agreement with Sauris GmBH Sauris GmBH manufactures development kits and tools of C200050006000 DaVinci Sitara OMAP and ARM processors from Texas Instruments It offers low cost and reliable platforms that leverages Texas Instrumentsrsquo processors and provides a promising addition to their broad product offeringSauris GmbH based in Munich Germany designs develops and manufactures hardware development tools for digital signal processors and microcontrollers and application specific devicesRead More
High-Voltage SPICE Models LaunchedIn the past high voltage (HV) discrete device and product development consisted of a long serial approach where technologies were developed in TCAD physical parts fabricated and packaged measurements performed and an iterative calibra-tion cycle launchedAs designers simulate application circuits with SPICE and not TCAD application simu-lations are often performed and calibrated very late in the technology development process when the silicon-based SPICE model is finally availableRead More
166 MHz Coral Q DeviceThe MB86293 ldquoCoral Qrdquo features display resolutions up to 1024times768 and 6-layers of overlay display (windows) and geometry processors It has and RGB digital and analog output with built-in alpha blending anti-aliasing and Chroma keyingThe new Coral device family offers an increased internal operating frequency of 166MHz a 64-bit memory bus support for six independent layers advanced alpha-blending features and enhanced video input facilitiesRead More
New Voltage Options for Rad Hard Family Intersil Corporation has expanded its line of radiation hardened (rad hard) voltage references with the addition of four new devices the ISL71091SEH10 20 33 and 40 These new devices offer better overall accuracy for 11-bit and 12-bit ADC resolution applications The ISL71091SEH family features industryrsquos best output voltage noise and a reference voltage that is stable over time temperature and ionizing radia-tion providing increased precision in satellite data acquisition signal processing and power management applicationsRead More
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4V Output Solar CellThe CPC1824 is a 4-V output solar cell providing wireless power and features replacement of discrete components It is wave solderable and does not generate EMIRFI interferencesThe CPC1824 is a monolithic photovoltaic string of solar cells on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) This patented design allows for higher voltage solar cells in a compact package When operating in sunlight or a bright artificial light environment the optical energy will activate the cell array and generate a voltage at the outputRead More
Quartz-Filled Two-Part Epoxy SystemThe EP30QF is two-part quartz filled epoxy system designed for high performance bonding sealing coating and casting This material is formulated to cure at room temperature or more rapidly at elevated temperatures with a 4-to-1 mix ratio by weight The suggested cure schedule for this system is overnight at room tempera-ture and followed by one to two hours at 150-200 ordmF to achieve optimization of its properties This adhesive is 100 reactive and does not contain any solvents or other volatiles It is especially recommended where high tensile modulus outstanding compressive strength and superior dimensional stability are important requirements Linear shrinkage after cure is exceptionally low A lower viscosity version called EP30QFLV is also availableRead More
ISDB-T 1-Segment TunerThe MAX2163 is an ISDB-T tuner that has a supply voltage range of 24 VDC to 347 VDC and incorporating a 2-wire serial I2C digital input with clock frequency of 400 kHz The devicersquo main signal path performance includes a maximum voltage gain of 96 dB and a noise figure of 32 dB to 53 dBThe MAX2163 low-IF tuner IC is designed for use in 1-segment ISDB-T applications The MAX2163 directly converts UHF band signals to a low-IF using a broadband IQ downconverter The operating frequency range covers the UHF band from 470MHz to 806MHzRead More
868915 MHz ASK TransmitterThe TH72032 is an 868-915-MHz ASK transmitter integrated circuit featuring a fully integrated PLL-stabilized VCO and a single-ended RF output It features a very low standby current and over-all frequency accuracyThe TH72032 ASK transmitter IC is designed for applications in the European 868 MHz industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) band according to the EN 300 220 telecommuni-cations standard It can also be used for any other system with carrier frequencies ranging from 850 MHz to 930 MHz (eg for applications in the US 902 to 928 MHz ISM band)Read More
Zero Drift Instrumentation Amplifier Microchip Technology expanded its portfolio for instrumentation amplifiers with the addition of its new zero-drift MCP6N16 This device has a self-correcting architecture that extends DC performance by enabling ultra-low offset low-offset drift and superior common-mode and power-supply rejection while eliminating the adverse effects of 1f noise resulting to a very high accuracy across both time and temperatureRead More
7Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
Compact Constant Current DCDC LED DriversThe LD24-xx-xxx is a series of Wide Input DCDC Constant Current LED Drivers that offers six models available now on the market These has an input voltage range of 70 ~ 300 Vdc and output voltage range of 20 ~ 280 Vdc With an output current accuracy of plusmn60 the devices have efficiency of 95 All models in the series comes up with PWM and analog dimming control Operating Temperature range of the device is from -40 to +85 degrees CelsciusRead More
NUC Atomtrade E3815 Board amp KitMouser Electronics Inc announced the availability of the next unit of computing with the Intel Atom E3815 Processor with board features of fanless design and an internal support for 25rdquo HDD or SSD It has built-in wireless antenna and dual back panel USB 20 portsThe Intel NUC with Intel Atom processor E3815 Board and Kit available from Mouser Electronics is a portable yet powerful computer system that is about the size of a paperback novel It features a fanless design and is expandable to up to 8GBytes of DDR3L SO-DIMM RAMRead More
Radial Lead Shield InductorsMurata Power Solutions introduces 1200RS a series of through hole radial lead shielded inductors that effectively operates at temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC The seriesrsquo maximum dc current is at the range of 044-46 A and maximum dc resistance is as low as possible at the range of 23-1500 mΩ There are thirteen (13) models under this family of inductorsRead More
High-Performance HDMIDVI Level ShifterThe PTN3360A is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface or Digital Visual Interface (HDMIDVI) level shifter with inverting Hot Plug Detect (HPD) This device features multiple level shifting such as high speed Transition-minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) level shifting Display Data Channel (DDC) level shifting and Hot Plug Detect (HPD) level shiftingRead More
Low-Voltage Single ComparatorThe NCX2202 is a low voltage single comparator with an open ndash drain output that consumes very low power This device features an internal hysteresis ESD protection rail-to-rail inputoutput performance and operate at a temperature range from -40 ordmC to +85 ordmC The NCX2202 has a very low supply current of 6 μA and is guaranteed to operate at a low voltage of 13 V and is fully operational up to 55 V These characteristics make the device convenient for use in both 30 V and 50 V systemsRead More
8 Visit eewebcom
2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
10 Visit eewebcom
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
CONTENTSPULSE
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4
10
16
24
32
38
44
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
To read the previous installment
click the image above
Alex Lidow
CEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the
advantages of eGaNreg FETs
employed in a traditional voltage-
mode class D and class E wireless
energy transfer were presented
In this installment a zero-voltage-
switching (ZVS) variation of the
voltage-mode class D amplifier will
be presented for highly resonant
loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band
wireless energy transfer that will
further show how eGaN FETs
enable new topologies with
dramatic improvements in
efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMS
Many wireless energy-transfer topology
solutions have focused on the benefits that a
particular topology offers at a specific operating
point In reality wireless energy systems
experience large coupling and load variations
that result in undesirable operating conditions
for some topologies Many high-frequency
high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of
resonance to establish soft-switching conditions
for the devices to yield high efficiency However
deviations from the ideal operating conditions
for these resonant-based topologies quickly
lead to nonideal operating conditions for the
devices with associated increase in losses The
class E topology is one that is particularly prone
to load variations as changes in the load lead to
reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting
in significant losses in the switching device as
it partially loses the zero voltage switching-
operating condition For the voltage-mode class
D topology the same condition leads to reduced
current in the amplifier with corresponding
lower losses in the devices This feature of the
voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate
for wireless energy systems However due to the
output capacitance of the switching devices it
has traditionally been operated above resonance
[3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing
it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-
current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation
of the voltage-mode class D is presented that
overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier
coil set with device-side matching as shown in
figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance
parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This
allows the discussion of the topology to focus
of the amplifier itself and how various operating
conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY
The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in
figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the
switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit
(LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate
the switch node This part of the circuit operates
as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless
switching for the devices without the need to
establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by
resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal
current for loading the amplifier The peak of the
load current does not coincide with the peak of
the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two
components of the circuit operate well together
and without significantly increasing device-
conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified
representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with
ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-
frequency
high-efficiency
topologies
make use of
resonance
to establish
soft-switching
conditions for
the devices
to yield high
efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
FEATURED PRODUCTSThis weeks latest products from EEWeb
TECH ARTICLEDeep Machine Learning and the Google Brain Artificilal Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
TECH ARTICLEMaxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
TECH ARTICLEHow to GaN Stable and Efficient ZVS Class D Wireless Energy Transfer at 678MHz
COVER INTERVIEWIBM Flash Systems Turn Data into Dollars Michael Kuhn and Kevin Powell IBM Flash Systems
FEATURED ARTICLEIBMrsquos Enterprise Flash Calms Sea of Data for Next-Generation Data Centers
TECH TRENDHigh-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
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Multioutput WLEDRGB Backlight DriverThe A8516 is Allegrorsquos multi-output WLEDRGB LED driver IC released since 2010 This LED driver is intended for backlighting LCD monitors and televisions It incorporates a boost controller to drive external MOSFET and six internal current sinks It features a fixed frequency current mode control with integrated gate driver The LED sink cur-rent is set by an external R_ISET resistor More than one LED sinks can be combined together to achieve even higher current per LED stringRead More
450 W DIN Rail-Mount Power SupplyThe PMK450S-12D is DIN rail mount power supply packaged in an enclosed construction This supply is capable of delivering up to 450 W of rated power and possess a power factor correction (PFC) function Output characteristics of the device includes a voltage output of 12 V and current output of 375 A Efficiency of the model reaches up to 85 with a guaranteed effective operation at the ex-tended temperature range of -40 to +85ordmC The PMK450S-12D is equipped with over current over temperature over voltage and short circuit protectionRead More
MMF Transceiver with Digital Diagnostic Avagorsquos AFBR-57J7APZ optical transceiver supports high speed serial links over multimode optical fiber at signaling rates up to 74 Gbs for wireless base station applications involving the OBSAI or CPRI protocols as well as related applications The transceiver is compliant with Small Form Pluggable (SFP) multi-source agree-ments INF8074 and SFF-8472 for mechanical and electrical specifcations and FOCISIEC specifications for optical duplex LC connectorsRead More
TASKING ISO 26262 Support ProgramAutomotive systems safety issues compound when numerous systems must interoperate while providing passenger comfort and features Embedded software forms a critical path in systems such as Driver Assistance Propulsion I n-Vehicle Dynamics and Active and Passive Safety Devices To mitigate the compounding safety risks associated with these embedded systems the ISO 26262 standard provides guidance along with requirements and processes for testing and certifying automotive embedded software and development tools for safetyRead More
192 kHz Digital Audio TransmitterThe CS8406 is a digital audio interface transmitter with featuring complete EIAJ CP1201 IEC-60958 AES3 SPDIF-compatible transmitter It has on-chip channel status and flexible 3-wire serial digital audio input port With frame rates up to 192 kHz and an on-chip differential line driverThe CS8406 is a digital audio transmitter that enables consumer and professional audio products to exchange 192 kHz SPDIF and AESEBU audio data The CS8406 accepts and encodes audio and digital data which is then multiplexed encoded and driven onto a cableoptical transmission interfaceRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
RFID Transponder CoilsThe 4312 Series are RFID transponder coils for RFID applications at 125 kHz It is designed to withstand the harshest mechanical shock and high temperatures and developed for tire pressure monitoring systemsThe coil is wound on a plastic base providing great durability and allowing this part to withstand physical shock With operating temperature range to 125degC these parts pass AEC-200 Grade 1 (-40degC to +125degC) qualification and are ideal for use in a wide range of automotive applications The uniquely shaped termination provides excellent board adhesionRead More
Development Tools for Embedded ProcessorsDigi-Key Corporation announced a global distribution agreement with Sauris GmBH Sauris GmBH manufactures development kits and tools of C200050006000 DaVinci Sitara OMAP and ARM processors from Texas Instruments It offers low cost and reliable platforms that leverages Texas Instrumentsrsquo processors and provides a promising addition to their broad product offeringSauris GmbH based in Munich Germany designs develops and manufactures hardware development tools for digital signal processors and microcontrollers and application specific devicesRead More
High-Voltage SPICE Models LaunchedIn the past high voltage (HV) discrete device and product development consisted of a long serial approach where technologies were developed in TCAD physical parts fabricated and packaged measurements performed and an iterative calibra-tion cycle launchedAs designers simulate application circuits with SPICE and not TCAD application simu-lations are often performed and calibrated very late in the technology development process when the silicon-based SPICE model is finally availableRead More
166 MHz Coral Q DeviceThe MB86293 ldquoCoral Qrdquo features display resolutions up to 1024times768 and 6-layers of overlay display (windows) and geometry processors It has and RGB digital and analog output with built-in alpha blending anti-aliasing and Chroma keyingThe new Coral device family offers an increased internal operating frequency of 166MHz a 64-bit memory bus support for six independent layers advanced alpha-blending features and enhanced video input facilitiesRead More
New Voltage Options for Rad Hard Family Intersil Corporation has expanded its line of radiation hardened (rad hard) voltage references with the addition of four new devices the ISL71091SEH10 20 33 and 40 These new devices offer better overall accuracy for 11-bit and 12-bit ADC resolution applications The ISL71091SEH family features industryrsquos best output voltage noise and a reference voltage that is stable over time temperature and ionizing radia-tion providing increased precision in satellite data acquisition signal processing and power management applicationsRead More
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4V Output Solar CellThe CPC1824 is a 4-V output solar cell providing wireless power and features replacement of discrete components It is wave solderable and does not generate EMIRFI interferencesThe CPC1824 is a monolithic photovoltaic string of solar cells on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) This patented design allows for higher voltage solar cells in a compact package When operating in sunlight or a bright artificial light environment the optical energy will activate the cell array and generate a voltage at the outputRead More
Quartz-Filled Two-Part Epoxy SystemThe EP30QF is two-part quartz filled epoxy system designed for high performance bonding sealing coating and casting This material is formulated to cure at room temperature or more rapidly at elevated temperatures with a 4-to-1 mix ratio by weight The suggested cure schedule for this system is overnight at room tempera-ture and followed by one to two hours at 150-200 ordmF to achieve optimization of its properties This adhesive is 100 reactive and does not contain any solvents or other volatiles It is especially recommended where high tensile modulus outstanding compressive strength and superior dimensional stability are important requirements Linear shrinkage after cure is exceptionally low A lower viscosity version called EP30QFLV is also availableRead More
ISDB-T 1-Segment TunerThe MAX2163 is an ISDB-T tuner that has a supply voltage range of 24 VDC to 347 VDC and incorporating a 2-wire serial I2C digital input with clock frequency of 400 kHz The devicersquo main signal path performance includes a maximum voltage gain of 96 dB and a noise figure of 32 dB to 53 dBThe MAX2163 low-IF tuner IC is designed for use in 1-segment ISDB-T applications The MAX2163 directly converts UHF band signals to a low-IF using a broadband IQ downconverter The operating frequency range covers the UHF band from 470MHz to 806MHzRead More
868915 MHz ASK TransmitterThe TH72032 is an 868-915-MHz ASK transmitter integrated circuit featuring a fully integrated PLL-stabilized VCO and a single-ended RF output It features a very low standby current and over-all frequency accuracyThe TH72032 ASK transmitter IC is designed for applications in the European 868 MHz industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) band according to the EN 300 220 telecommuni-cations standard It can also be used for any other system with carrier frequencies ranging from 850 MHz to 930 MHz (eg for applications in the US 902 to 928 MHz ISM band)Read More
Zero Drift Instrumentation Amplifier Microchip Technology expanded its portfolio for instrumentation amplifiers with the addition of its new zero-drift MCP6N16 This device has a self-correcting architecture that extends DC performance by enabling ultra-low offset low-offset drift and superior common-mode and power-supply rejection while eliminating the adverse effects of 1f noise resulting to a very high accuracy across both time and temperatureRead More
7Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
Compact Constant Current DCDC LED DriversThe LD24-xx-xxx is a series of Wide Input DCDC Constant Current LED Drivers that offers six models available now on the market These has an input voltage range of 70 ~ 300 Vdc and output voltage range of 20 ~ 280 Vdc With an output current accuracy of plusmn60 the devices have efficiency of 95 All models in the series comes up with PWM and analog dimming control Operating Temperature range of the device is from -40 to +85 degrees CelsciusRead More
NUC Atomtrade E3815 Board amp KitMouser Electronics Inc announced the availability of the next unit of computing with the Intel Atom E3815 Processor with board features of fanless design and an internal support for 25rdquo HDD or SSD It has built-in wireless antenna and dual back panel USB 20 portsThe Intel NUC with Intel Atom processor E3815 Board and Kit available from Mouser Electronics is a portable yet powerful computer system that is about the size of a paperback novel It features a fanless design and is expandable to up to 8GBytes of DDR3L SO-DIMM RAMRead More
Radial Lead Shield InductorsMurata Power Solutions introduces 1200RS a series of through hole radial lead shielded inductors that effectively operates at temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC The seriesrsquo maximum dc current is at the range of 044-46 A and maximum dc resistance is as low as possible at the range of 23-1500 mΩ There are thirteen (13) models under this family of inductorsRead More
High-Performance HDMIDVI Level ShifterThe PTN3360A is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface or Digital Visual Interface (HDMIDVI) level shifter with inverting Hot Plug Detect (HPD) This device features multiple level shifting such as high speed Transition-minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) level shifting Display Data Channel (DDC) level shifting and Hot Plug Detect (HPD) level shiftingRead More
Low-Voltage Single ComparatorThe NCX2202 is a low voltage single comparator with an open ndash drain output that consumes very low power This device features an internal hysteresis ESD protection rail-to-rail inputoutput performance and operate at a temperature range from -40 ordmC to +85 ordmC The NCX2202 has a very low supply current of 6 μA and is guaranteed to operate at a low voltage of 13 V and is fully operational up to 55 V These characteristics make the device convenient for use in both 30 V and 50 V systemsRead More
8 Visit eewebcom
2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
10 Visit eewebcom
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
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PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
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Multioutput WLEDRGB Backlight DriverThe A8516 is Allegrorsquos multi-output WLEDRGB LED driver IC released since 2010 This LED driver is intended for backlighting LCD monitors and televisions It incorporates a boost controller to drive external MOSFET and six internal current sinks It features a fixed frequency current mode control with integrated gate driver The LED sink cur-rent is set by an external R_ISET resistor More than one LED sinks can be combined together to achieve even higher current per LED stringRead More
450 W DIN Rail-Mount Power SupplyThe PMK450S-12D is DIN rail mount power supply packaged in an enclosed construction This supply is capable of delivering up to 450 W of rated power and possess a power factor correction (PFC) function Output characteristics of the device includes a voltage output of 12 V and current output of 375 A Efficiency of the model reaches up to 85 with a guaranteed effective operation at the ex-tended temperature range of -40 to +85ordmC The PMK450S-12D is equipped with over current over temperature over voltage and short circuit protectionRead More
MMF Transceiver with Digital Diagnostic Avagorsquos AFBR-57J7APZ optical transceiver supports high speed serial links over multimode optical fiber at signaling rates up to 74 Gbs for wireless base station applications involving the OBSAI or CPRI protocols as well as related applications The transceiver is compliant with Small Form Pluggable (SFP) multi-source agree-ments INF8074 and SFF-8472 for mechanical and electrical specifcations and FOCISIEC specifications for optical duplex LC connectorsRead More
TASKING ISO 26262 Support ProgramAutomotive systems safety issues compound when numerous systems must interoperate while providing passenger comfort and features Embedded software forms a critical path in systems such as Driver Assistance Propulsion I n-Vehicle Dynamics and Active and Passive Safety Devices To mitigate the compounding safety risks associated with these embedded systems the ISO 26262 standard provides guidance along with requirements and processes for testing and certifying automotive embedded software and development tools for safetyRead More
192 kHz Digital Audio TransmitterThe CS8406 is a digital audio interface transmitter with featuring complete EIAJ CP1201 IEC-60958 AES3 SPDIF-compatible transmitter It has on-chip channel status and flexible 3-wire serial digital audio input port With frame rates up to 192 kHz and an on-chip differential line driverThe CS8406 is a digital audio transmitter that enables consumer and professional audio products to exchange 192 kHz SPDIF and AESEBU audio data The CS8406 accepts and encodes audio and digital data which is then multiplexed encoded and driven onto a cableoptical transmission interfaceRead More
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RFID Transponder CoilsThe 4312 Series are RFID transponder coils for RFID applications at 125 kHz It is designed to withstand the harshest mechanical shock and high temperatures and developed for tire pressure monitoring systemsThe coil is wound on a plastic base providing great durability and allowing this part to withstand physical shock With operating temperature range to 125degC these parts pass AEC-200 Grade 1 (-40degC to +125degC) qualification and are ideal for use in a wide range of automotive applications The uniquely shaped termination provides excellent board adhesionRead More
Development Tools for Embedded ProcessorsDigi-Key Corporation announced a global distribution agreement with Sauris GmBH Sauris GmBH manufactures development kits and tools of C200050006000 DaVinci Sitara OMAP and ARM processors from Texas Instruments It offers low cost and reliable platforms that leverages Texas Instrumentsrsquo processors and provides a promising addition to their broad product offeringSauris GmbH based in Munich Germany designs develops and manufactures hardware development tools for digital signal processors and microcontrollers and application specific devicesRead More
High-Voltage SPICE Models LaunchedIn the past high voltage (HV) discrete device and product development consisted of a long serial approach where technologies were developed in TCAD physical parts fabricated and packaged measurements performed and an iterative calibra-tion cycle launchedAs designers simulate application circuits with SPICE and not TCAD application simu-lations are often performed and calibrated very late in the technology development process when the silicon-based SPICE model is finally availableRead More
166 MHz Coral Q DeviceThe MB86293 ldquoCoral Qrdquo features display resolutions up to 1024times768 and 6-layers of overlay display (windows) and geometry processors It has and RGB digital and analog output with built-in alpha blending anti-aliasing and Chroma keyingThe new Coral device family offers an increased internal operating frequency of 166MHz a 64-bit memory bus support for six independent layers advanced alpha-blending features and enhanced video input facilitiesRead More
New Voltage Options for Rad Hard Family Intersil Corporation has expanded its line of radiation hardened (rad hard) voltage references with the addition of four new devices the ISL71091SEH10 20 33 and 40 These new devices offer better overall accuracy for 11-bit and 12-bit ADC resolution applications The ISL71091SEH family features industryrsquos best output voltage noise and a reference voltage that is stable over time temperature and ionizing radia-tion providing increased precision in satellite data acquisition signal processing and power management applicationsRead More
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4V Output Solar CellThe CPC1824 is a 4-V output solar cell providing wireless power and features replacement of discrete components It is wave solderable and does not generate EMIRFI interferencesThe CPC1824 is a monolithic photovoltaic string of solar cells on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) This patented design allows for higher voltage solar cells in a compact package When operating in sunlight or a bright artificial light environment the optical energy will activate the cell array and generate a voltage at the outputRead More
Quartz-Filled Two-Part Epoxy SystemThe EP30QF is two-part quartz filled epoxy system designed for high performance bonding sealing coating and casting This material is formulated to cure at room temperature or more rapidly at elevated temperatures with a 4-to-1 mix ratio by weight The suggested cure schedule for this system is overnight at room tempera-ture and followed by one to two hours at 150-200 ordmF to achieve optimization of its properties This adhesive is 100 reactive and does not contain any solvents or other volatiles It is especially recommended where high tensile modulus outstanding compressive strength and superior dimensional stability are important requirements Linear shrinkage after cure is exceptionally low A lower viscosity version called EP30QFLV is also availableRead More
ISDB-T 1-Segment TunerThe MAX2163 is an ISDB-T tuner that has a supply voltage range of 24 VDC to 347 VDC and incorporating a 2-wire serial I2C digital input with clock frequency of 400 kHz The devicersquo main signal path performance includes a maximum voltage gain of 96 dB and a noise figure of 32 dB to 53 dBThe MAX2163 low-IF tuner IC is designed for use in 1-segment ISDB-T applications The MAX2163 directly converts UHF band signals to a low-IF using a broadband IQ downconverter The operating frequency range covers the UHF band from 470MHz to 806MHzRead More
868915 MHz ASK TransmitterThe TH72032 is an 868-915-MHz ASK transmitter integrated circuit featuring a fully integrated PLL-stabilized VCO and a single-ended RF output It features a very low standby current and over-all frequency accuracyThe TH72032 ASK transmitter IC is designed for applications in the European 868 MHz industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) band according to the EN 300 220 telecommuni-cations standard It can also be used for any other system with carrier frequencies ranging from 850 MHz to 930 MHz (eg for applications in the US 902 to 928 MHz ISM band)Read More
Zero Drift Instrumentation Amplifier Microchip Technology expanded its portfolio for instrumentation amplifiers with the addition of its new zero-drift MCP6N16 This device has a self-correcting architecture that extends DC performance by enabling ultra-low offset low-offset drift and superior common-mode and power-supply rejection while eliminating the adverse effects of 1f noise resulting to a very high accuracy across both time and temperatureRead More
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Compact Constant Current DCDC LED DriversThe LD24-xx-xxx is a series of Wide Input DCDC Constant Current LED Drivers that offers six models available now on the market These has an input voltage range of 70 ~ 300 Vdc and output voltage range of 20 ~ 280 Vdc With an output current accuracy of plusmn60 the devices have efficiency of 95 All models in the series comes up with PWM and analog dimming control Operating Temperature range of the device is from -40 to +85 degrees CelsciusRead More
NUC Atomtrade E3815 Board amp KitMouser Electronics Inc announced the availability of the next unit of computing with the Intel Atom E3815 Processor with board features of fanless design and an internal support for 25rdquo HDD or SSD It has built-in wireless antenna and dual back panel USB 20 portsThe Intel NUC with Intel Atom processor E3815 Board and Kit available from Mouser Electronics is a portable yet powerful computer system that is about the size of a paperback novel It features a fanless design and is expandable to up to 8GBytes of DDR3L SO-DIMM RAMRead More
Radial Lead Shield InductorsMurata Power Solutions introduces 1200RS a series of through hole radial lead shielded inductors that effectively operates at temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC The seriesrsquo maximum dc current is at the range of 044-46 A and maximum dc resistance is as low as possible at the range of 23-1500 mΩ There are thirteen (13) models under this family of inductorsRead More
High-Performance HDMIDVI Level ShifterThe PTN3360A is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface or Digital Visual Interface (HDMIDVI) level shifter with inverting Hot Plug Detect (HPD) This device features multiple level shifting such as high speed Transition-minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) level shifting Display Data Channel (DDC) level shifting and Hot Plug Detect (HPD) level shiftingRead More
Low-Voltage Single ComparatorThe NCX2202 is a low voltage single comparator with an open ndash drain output that consumes very low power This device features an internal hysteresis ESD protection rail-to-rail inputoutput performance and operate at a temperature range from -40 ordmC to +85 ordmC The NCX2202 has a very low supply current of 6 μA and is guaranteed to operate at a low voltage of 13 V and is fully operational up to 55 V These characteristics make the device convenient for use in both 30 V and 50 V systemsRead More
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2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
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High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
10 Visit eewebcom
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
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AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
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PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
5Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
RFID Transponder CoilsThe 4312 Series are RFID transponder coils for RFID applications at 125 kHz It is designed to withstand the harshest mechanical shock and high temperatures and developed for tire pressure monitoring systemsThe coil is wound on a plastic base providing great durability and allowing this part to withstand physical shock With operating temperature range to 125degC these parts pass AEC-200 Grade 1 (-40degC to +125degC) qualification and are ideal for use in a wide range of automotive applications The uniquely shaped termination provides excellent board adhesionRead More
Development Tools for Embedded ProcessorsDigi-Key Corporation announced a global distribution agreement with Sauris GmBH Sauris GmBH manufactures development kits and tools of C200050006000 DaVinci Sitara OMAP and ARM processors from Texas Instruments It offers low cost and reliable platforms that leverages Texas Instrumentsrsquo processors and provides a promising addition to their broad product offeringSauris GmbH based in Munich Germany designs develops and manufactures hardware development tools for digital signal processors and microcontrollers and application specific devicesRead More
High-Voltage SPICE Models LaunchedIn the past high voltage (HV) discrete device and product development consisted of a long serial approach where technologies were developed in TCAD physical parts fabricated and packaged measurements performed and an iterative calibra-tion cycle launchedAs designers simulate application circuits with SPICE and not TCAD application simu-lations are often performed and calibrated very late in the technology development process when the silicon-based SPICE model is finally availableRead More
166 MHz Coral Q DeviceThe MB86293 ldquoCoral Qrdquo features display resolutions up to 1024times768 and 6-layers of overlay display (windows) and geometry processors It has and RGB digital and analog output with built-in alpha blending anti-aliasing and Chroma keyingThe new Coral device family offers an increased internal operating frequency of 166MHz a 64-bit memory bus support for six independent layers advanced alpha-blending features and enhanced video input facilitiesRead More
New Voltage Options for Rad Hard Family Intersil Corporation has expanded its line of radiation hardened (rad hard) voltage references with the addition of four new devices the ISL71091SEH10 20 33 and 40 These new devices offer better overall accuracy for 11-bit and 12-bit ADC resolution applications The ISL71091SEH family features industryrsquos best output voltage noise and a reference voltage that is stable over time temperature and ionizing radia-tion providing increased precision in satellite data acquisition signal processing and power management applicationsRead More
6 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
4V Output Solar CellThe CPC1824 is a 4-V output solar cell providing wireless power and features replacement of discrete components It is wave solderable and does not generate EMIRFI interferencesThe CPC1824 is a monolithic photovoltaic string of solar cells on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) This patented design allows for higher voltage solar cells in a compact package When operating in sunlight or a bright artificial light environment the optical energy will activate the cell array and generate a voltage at the outputRead More
Quartz-Filled Two-Part Epoxy SystemThe EP30QF is two-part quartz filled epoxy system designed for high performance bonding sealing coating and casting This material is formulated to cure at room temperature or more rapidly at elevated temperatures with a 4-to-1 mix ratio by weight The suggested cure schedule for this system is overnight at room tempera-ture and followed by one to two hours at 150-200 ordmF to achieve optimization of its properties This adhesive is 100 reactive and does not contain any solvents or other volatiles It is especially recommended where high tensile modulus outstanding compressive strength and superior dimensional stability are important requirements Linear shrinkage after cure is exceptionally low A lower viscosity version called EP30QFLV is also availableRead More
ISDB-T 1-Segment TunerThe MAX2163 is an ISDB-T tuner that has a supply voltage range of 24 VDC to 347 VDC and incorporating a 2-wire serial I2C digital input with clock frequency of 400 kHz The devicersquo main signal path performance includes a maximum voltage gain of 96 dB and a noise figure of 32 dB to 53 dBThe MAX2163 low-IF tuner IC is designed for use in 1-segment ISDB-T applications The MAX2163 directly converts UHF band signals to a low-IF using a broadband IQ downconverter The operating frequency range covers the UHF band from 470MHz to 806MHzRead More
868915 MHz ASK TransmitterThe TH72032 is an 868-915-MHz ASK transmitter integrated circuit featuring a fully integrated PLL-stabilized VCO and a single-ended RF output It features a very low standby current and over-all frequency accuracyThe TH72032 ASK transmitter IC is designed for applications in the European 868 MHz industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) band according to the EN 300 220 telecommuni-cations standard It can also be used for any other system with carrier frequencies ranging from 850 MHz to 930 MHz (eg for applications in the US 902 to 928 MHz ISM band)Read More
Zero Drift Instrumentation Amplifier Microchip Technology expanded its portfolio for instrumentation amplifiers with the addition of its new zero-drift MCP6N16 This device has a self-correcting architecture that extends DC performance by enabling ultra-low offset low-offset drift and superior common-mode and power-supply rejection while eliminating the adverse effects of 1f noise resulting to a very high accuracy across both time and temperatureRead More
7Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
Compact Constant Current DCDC LED DriversThe LD24-xx-xxx is a series of Wide Input DCDC Constant Current LED Drivers that offers six models available now on the market These has an input voltage range of 70 ~ 300 Vdc and output voltage range of 20 ~ 280 Vdc With an output current accuracy of plusmn60 the devices have efficiency of 95 All models in the series comes up with PWM and analog dimming control Operating Temperature range of the device is from -40 to +85 degrees CelsciusRead More
NUC Atomtrade E3815 Board amp KitMouser Electronics Inc announced the availability of the next unit of computing with the Intel Atom E3815 Processor with board features of fanless design and an internal support for 25rdquo HDD or SSD It has built-in wireless antenna and dual back panel USB 20 portsThe Intel NUC with Intel Atom processor E3815 Board and Kit available from Mouser Electronics is a portable yet powerful computer system that is about the size of a paperback novel It features a fanless design and is expandable to up to 8GBytes of DDR3L SO-DIMM RAMRead More
Radial Lead Shield InductorsMurata Power Solutions introduces 1200RS a series of through hole radial lead shielded inductors that effectively operates at temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC The seriesrsquo maximum dc current is at the range of 044-46 A and maximum dc resistance is as low as possible at the range of 23-1500 mΩ There are thirteen (13) models under this family of inductorsRead More
High-Performance HDMIDVI Level ShifterThe PTN3360A is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface or Digital Visual Interface (HDMIDVI) level shifter with inverting Hot Plug Detect (HPD) This device features multiple level shifting such as high speed Transition-minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) level shifting Display Data Channel (DDC) level shifting and Hot Plug Detect (HPD) level shiftingRead More
Low-Voltage Single ComparatorThe NCX2202 is a low voltage single comparator with an open ndash drain output that consumes very low power This device features an internal hysteresis ESD protection rail-to-rail inputoutput performance and operate at a temperature range from -40 ordmC to +85 ordmC The NCX2202 has a very low supply current of 6 μA and is guaranteed to operate at a low voltage of 13 V and is fully operational up to 55 V These characteristics make the device convenient for use in both 30 V and 50 V systemsRead More
8 Visit eewebcom
2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
PULSE
9Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
10 Visit eewebcom
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
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High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
6 Visit eewebcom
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4V Output Solar CellThe CPC1824 is a 4-V output solar cell providing wireless power and features replacement of discrete components It is wave solderable and does not generate EMIRFI interferencesThe CPC1824 is a monolithic photovoltaic string of solar cells on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) This patented design allows for higher voltage solar cells in a compact package When operating in sunlight or a bright artificial light environment the optical energy will activate the cell array and generate a voltage at the outputRead More
Quartz-Filled Two-Part Epoxy SystemThe EP30QF is two-part quartz filled epoxy system designed for high performance bonding sealing coating and casting This material is formulated to cure at room temperature or more rapidly at elevated temperatures with a 4-to-1 mix ratio by weight The suggested cure schedule for this system is overnight at room tempera-ture and followed by one to two hours at 150-200 ordmF to achieve optimization of its properties This adhesive is 100 reactive and does not contain any solvents or other volatiles It is especially recommended where high tensile modulus outstanding compressive strength and superior dimensional stability are important requirements Linear shrinkage after cure is exceptionally low A lower viscosity version called EP30QFLV is also availableRead More
ISDB-T 1-Segment TunerThe MAX2163 is an ISDB-T tuner that has a supply voltage range of 24 VDC to 347 VDC and incorporating a 2-wire serial I2C digital input with clock frequency of 400 kHz The devicersquo main signal path performance includes a maximum voltage gain of 96 dB and a noise figure of 32 dB to 53 dBThe MAX2163 low-IF tuner IC is designed for use in 1-segment ISDB-T applications The MAX2163 directly converts UHF band signals to a low-IF using a broadband IQ downconverter The operating frequency range covers the UHF band from 470MHz to 806MHzRead More
868915 MHz ASK TransmitterThe TH72032 is an 868-915-MHz ASK transmitter integrated circuit featuring a fully integrated PLL-stabilized VCO and a single-ended RF output It features a very low standby current and over-all frequency accuracyThe TH72032 ASK transmitter IC is designed for applications in the European 868 MHz industrial-scientific-medical (ISM) band according to the EN 300 220 telecommuni-cations standard It can also be used for any other system with carrier frequencies ranging from 850 MHz to 930 MHz (eg for applications in the US 902 to 928 MHz ISM band)Read More
Zero Drift Instrumentation Amplifier Microchip Technology expanded its portfolio for instrumentation amplifiers with the addition of its new zero-drift MCP6N16 This device has a self-correcting architecture that extends DC performance by enabling ultra-low offset low-offset drift and superior common-mode and power-supply rejection while eliminating the adverse effects of 1f noise resulting to a very high accuracy across both time and temperatureRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
Compact Constant Current DCDC LED DriversThe LD24-xx-xxx is a series of Wide Input DCDC Constant Current LED Drivers that offers six models available now on the market These has an input voltage range of 70 ~ 300 Vdc and output voltage range of 20 ~ 280 Vdc With an output current accuracy of plusmn60 the devices have efficiency of 95 All models in the series comes up with PWM and analog dimming control Operating Temperature range of the device is from -40 to +85 degrees CelsciusRead More
NUC Atomtrade E3815 Board amp KitMouser Electronics Inc announced the availability of the next unit of computing with the Intel Atom E3815 Processor with board features of fanless design and an internal support for 25rdquo HDD or SSD It has built-in wireless antenna and dual back panel USB 20 portsThe Intel NUC with Intel Atom processor E3815 Board and Kit available from Mouser Electronics is a portable yet powerful computer system that is about the size of a paperback novel It features a fanless design and is expandable to up to 8GBytes of DDR3L SO-DIMM RAMRead More
Radial Lead Shield InductorsMurata Power Solutions introduces 1200RS a series of through hole radial lead shielded inductors that effectively operates at temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC The seriesrsquo maximum dc current is at the range of 044-46 A and maximum dc resistance is as low as possible at the range of 23-1500 mΩ There are thirteen (13) models under this family of inductorsRead More
High-Performance HDMIDVI Level ShifterThe PTN3360A is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface or Digital Visual Interface (HDMIDVI) level shifter with inverting Hot Plug Detect (HPD) This device features multiple level shifting such as high speed Transition-minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) level shifting Display Data Channel (DDC) level shifting and Hot Plug Detect (HPD) level shiftingRead More
Low-Voltage Single ComparatorThe NCX2202 is a low voltage single comparator with an open ndash drain output that consumes very low power This device features an internal hysteresis ESD protection rail-to-rail inputoutput performance and operate at a temperature range from -40 ordmC to +85 ordmC The NCX2202 has a very low supply current of 6 μA and is guaranteed to operate at a low voltage of 13 V and is fully operational up to 55 V These characteristics make the device convenient for use in both 30 V and 50 V systemsRead More
8 Visit eewebcom
2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
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9Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
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AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
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authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
7Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
Compact Constant Current DCDC LED DriversThe LD24-xx-xxx is a series of Wide Input DCDC Constant Current LED Drivers that offers six models available now on the market These has an input voltage range of 70 ~ 300 Vdc and output voltage range of 20 ~ 280 Vdc With an output current accuracy of plusmn60 the devices have efficiency of 95 All models in the series comes up with PWM and analog dimming control Operating Temperature range of the device is from -40 to +85 degrees CelsciusRead More
NUC Atomtrade E3815 Board amp KitMouser Electronics Inc announced the availability of the next unit of computing with the Intel Atom E3815 Processor with board features of fanless design and an internal support for 25rdquo HDD or SSD It has built-in wireless antenna and dual back panel USB 20 portsThe Intel NUC with Intel Atom processor E3815 Board and Kit available from Mouser Electronics is a portable yet powerful computer system that is about the size of a paperback novel It features a fanless design and is expandable to up to 8GBytes of DDR3L SO-DIMM RAMRead More
Radial Lead Shield InductorsMurata Power Solutions introduces 1200RS a series of through hole radial lead shielded inductors that effectively operates at temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC The seriesrsquo maximum dc current is at the range of 044-46 A and maximum dc resistance is as low as possible at the range of 23-1500 mΩ There are thirteen (13) models under this family of inductorsRead More
High-Performance HDMIDVI Level ShifterThe PTN3360A is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface or Digital Visual Interface (HDMIDVI) level shifter with inverting Hot Plug Detect (HPD) This device features multiple level shifting such as high speed Transition-minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) level shifting Display Data Channel (DDC) level shifting and Hot Plug Detect (HPD) level shiftingRead More
Low-Voltage Single ComparatorThe NCX2202 is a low voltage single comparator with an open ndash drain output that consumes very low power This device features an internal hysteresis ESD protection rail-to-rail inputoutput performance and operate at a temperature range from -40 ordmC to +85 ordmC The NCX2202 has a very low supply current of 6 μA and is guaranteed to operate at a low voltage of 13 V and is fully operational up to 55 V These characteristics make the device convenient for use in both 30 V and 50 V systemsRead More
8 Visit eewebcom
2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
PULSE
9Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
10 Visit eewebcom
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
8 Visit eewebcom
2-Channel Plug-and-Play DriverThe 2SP0435 is a two-channel plug-and-play driver based on SCALEtrade-2 technology from CONCEPT intended for 130 mm x 140mm dual IGBT modules This compact high performance plug-and-play driver features an electrical or fiber optic interface with an integrated DC-DC power supply The 2SP0435T uses an electrical interface while the 2SP0435V uses the fiber optic interfaceRead More
Wide Input 1100 W DCDC Power SupplyThe PFE1100-12-054ND is one of the models of Power-Onersquos PFE series which is a family of excellent Platinum-level 80-PLUS efficiency power supplies that features Power Factor Correction and a small 54mm form factor with a wide input voltage range The product requires an input voltage at the range of 40 VDC to 72 VDCRead More
Quadruple ComparatorsThe HA17901A series are quadruple comparators featuring wide power-supply voltage range and very low supply current It features low input bias current and low input offset current It has common mode input voltage range and output voltages compatible with CMOS logic systemsThe HA17901A series products are comparators designed for general purpose especially for power control systems These ICs operate from a single power supply voltage over a wide range of voltages and features a reduced power supply current since the supply current is independent of the supply voltageRead More
Accurate Arbitrary Waveform Function GeneratorsThe DG1022 is an arbitrary waveform generator that outputs maximum frequency of 20 MHz (5 MHz square wave) With an addition of 10 non-volatile memories the instrument can store and edit more waves It also supports all kinds of modulation which makes it helpful for educational and testing purposes The device can be operated in both auto mode and manual modeRead More
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
10 Visit eewebcom
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
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AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
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PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
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PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
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High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
9Visit eewebcom
FEATURED PRODUCTS
High-Reliability Serial EEPROMs The BR24G01FVT-3A is a serial EEPROM with high reliability when it comes to speed since the device has more than 1 million write cycles This IC has 1Kbit density and comes with an I2C bus (2-Wire) interface The product is offered in a TSSOP-B8 package and is guaranteed to operate effectively at the extended temperature range of -40ordmC to +85ordmC Read More
PushPull Thermal Circuit BreakerThe W23 Series is a thermal circuit breaker with a pushpull actuator that combines onoff switching with circuit protection in a single unit This series of circuit breaker features 05 A to 50 A ratings used as onoff switch and has a visible trip indicator band The W23 Series is approved under UL 1077 standard recognized as supplementary protector Read More
Digital Output Sensor Signal ConditionerThe ZSC31014 is a Digital Output Sensor Signal Conditioner featuring high accuracy and fast power-up data output response It has digital compensation of sensor offset and internal temperature compensationThe ZSC31014 is a CMOS integrated circuit for highly accurate amplifica-tion and analog-to-digital conversion of differential and half-bridge input signals The ZSC31014 can compensate the measured signal for offset 1st and 2nd order span and 1st and 2nd order temperature (Tco and Tcg) It is well suited for sensor-specific correction of bridge sensorsRead More
eewebcomregister
Join Today
10 Visit eewebcom
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GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
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PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
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PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
10 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
11Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
GooGle BrainArtificial Intelligence Thinks Big and Pushes the Limits
By Rob Riemen Computer Engineer PREMIER System Integrators
The Google corporation has grown up maturing into a multibillion dollar company by the early age of 16 As the premier search engine Google is easier to use and more popular than all others But rise to giant stature
requires a company continue to innovate increase in desirability and become more marketable And itrsquos better that a search engine not be the only feature of a companyrsquos business model So Google took some business classes and decided that it needed more technology products
Since the early days of the company Google has had a handful of products in development Some succeeded some failed In 2006 Google began discontinuing less promising products while retaining the best and those with the most progressive technology With their exhaustive research Google developed the Google Driverless Car Google Glass Chromecast and Google maps These innovations combined with Googlesrsquos main line of products have earned the company annual revenue of $59825 billion which allows them to be at the forefront of technology
Deep MachineLearning and the
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
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Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
12 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
13Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
AMBITIOUS BRAINIACOne of Googlersquos more ambitious projects is Google Brain which entails research into deep learning by computers Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data using a set of advanced algorithms These algorithms use architectures composed of multiple nonlinear transformations Deep learning has become popular because computer scientists want to crack the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)
There are several issues in artificial intelligence that Google Brain is addressing One problem that may arise is software which works on one
architecture but not another The software lacks the ability to adapt to various hardware in the way that people can adapt to environment Another challenge with artificial intelligence is the extreme difficulty of getting software to play games the way a person does Some tests contain AI playing a game of chess against a human The AI in chess uses deep-search trees in order to pick out the correct move based on the positions of all pieces In spite of this (or possibly because of it) the AI still does not grasp the feel of playing against a real person in a chess game By developing Google Brain Google hopes to solve these puzzles of artificial intelligence and push technology to the limits
Google Brain functions on what is called machine learning Machine learning is the process in which computers take in massive amounts of data and pick qualities out of the data that are very similar to each other From here the machine can then decide on a course of action based on what data it has gathered Google has set out to create a computing system that can accomplish this task in multiple cases This required Google to build a computer farm with 16000 central processing unit (CPU) cores and run millions of computations across these CPUrsquos The CPUrsquos simulated models with more than 1 billion connections which simulates the brain by creating artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks are systems in which many different computing platforms mix together to simulate interconnected neurons that can compute values from inputs Humans have over 100 billion neurons in the brain Google does not quite have the capacity to simulate a fully functional human brain but it has been able to build a system that can replicate some of the qualities of a brain
Figure 1 Biological neural network
Deep learning in computing is accomplished by modeling high-level abstractions in data
using a set of advanced algorithmsrdquo
ldquo
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
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PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
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IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
14 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
15Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
CAT AND THE MACHINEGoogle has spent millions of dollars trying to replicate a biological brain However Googlersquos efforts may be in vain In order to validate the correct functionality a series of complicated tests must be performed This can benchmark the actual functionality of the system Google conducted a test to determine if the system could be a very small-scale ldquonewborn brainrdquo This was accomplished by allowing the system to analyze YouTube video stills for a week One artificial neuron was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stills The system had no idea what a cat was nor was any image that it viewed labeled as a cat and yet was able to learn what a cat was and what it looked like This is a huge step forward in developing a system that can learn on its own
Figure 2 A functioning data center
As fascinating as cats may be Google is not using its brain device just to look at cat pictures on the Internet Rather the corporation is using the brain to help advance other Google systems Google owns massive data centers that take in and regurgitate all of the data that flows in and out of the Google family of products Google is using their artificial brain to analyze how data centers behave With this information data centers can adjust accordingly and function more efficiently Some of the information collected details energy consumption at the data center facilities The brain mixes this with data involving environmental temperature and the amount of water used in cooling computer hardware Google can use this data to streamline energy use across temperature platforms in each of their data
centers thereby reducing energy waste If this experiment produces quality results for Google in the energy-efficiency field then the possibilities of the technology are endless
ARTIFICIAL FUTUREBecause of the challenges of artificial intelligence technology in this field has progressed very slowly With technology doubling in size every 18 months (according to Moorersquos Law) however it has become more feasible to contemplate solutions especially considering Googlersquos involvement in the quest Powered by 16000 CPUrsquos and many more to come Google is well inside the arena of machine learning Although the technology hasnrsquot been perfected yet gigantic strides indicate that with age Google and their brain will just get smarter and smarter
Google is using their artificial brain to
analyze how data centers behaverdquo
ldquo
One artificial neuron
was able to distinguish pictures of cats after running through the countless video stillsrdquo
ldquo
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
16 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
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36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
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PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
17Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Secure AuthenticatorsDeepCoverreg
Maxim
Device authentication is used to protect end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) from the use of counterfeit peripherals
sensors consumables or other devices It is a method that verifies to the host system that an attached device is genuine and can be trusted
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
18 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
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PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
19Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
DEVICE AUTHENTICATIONA counterfeit device could simply be a cheap clone of the original For instance a medical sensor that plugs into a control module may be carefully manufactured to look and act the same but the quality of the device and the accuracy of the data would likely fall short of the OEM device In this case the sensor data would be questionable possibly leading to a misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment Clearly device authentication provides protection to patients and their wellbeing and ensures that health care providers arenrsquot exposed to the liability of a misdiagnosis because of counterfeit devices
As the world and its many devices become more interconnected the medical industrial and defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devices In turn OEMs are implementing various levels of security to prevent the use of counterfeit devices One of the primary methods of providing this security is through the use of a secure authentication scheme
AUTHENTICATION METHODSLess secure authentication methods work much like an ID in that as long as the host system is provided with the correct ID data the peripheral device is assumed to be authentic This is one level of security that is used in certain applications but the problem is that the ID is exposed during communication from slave to host and is then accessible to the attacker This scheme is easily bypassed through recording or replaying the ID data and then acting as an authentic device
One method that has been shown to be very robust is the use of a one-way hash function A one-way hash is easy to generate given the algorithm and all of its elements but is nearly impossible to invert to discover the input elements SHA-256 is one such hash function Maxim uses SHA-256 functions to calculate a message authentication code (MAC) based on multiple public and private data elements A peripheral authentication integrated circuit (IC) would calculate a MAC send it to the host
system and the host would calculate its own MAC presumably with the same input Then the host would compare its own MAC to that of the peripheral and if they match then the peripheralrsquos authenticity is ensured As long as the private data elements remain secure SHA-256 authentication provides a very high level of certainty that a peripheralrsquos MAC is indeed authentic
SHA-256 algorithms can be implemented in software on both the host and peripheral but software implementations can be tricky to implement and have obvious vulnerabilities A hacker who is able to break the controller protections and decompile the code will have access to the secrets used in the authentication process A hardware-based SHA-256 secure
A s the world and its many devices become more ldquointerconnected the medical industrial and
defense sectors in particular have become increasingly aware of the impact of counterfeit devicesrdquo
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
20 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
21Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
authentication system using a secure authentication IC is more secure it provides the benefits of a one-way hash function and the security of hardware-based cryptography Data elements such as the secret can be stored in protected memory that can be used as an input to the algorithm but not read out Countermeasures are implemented on the hardware-authentication ICs to make it nearly impossible to extract the secret or create a work-around by physical examination of the device
To protect the host-side secret in a SHA-256 scheme a secure coprocessor can be used The coprocessor holds the host secret in protected memory and performs SHA-256 computations for the host side Alternatively to avoid needing to protect a host-side secret public key-based algorithms like ECDSA do not use a host-side secret Rather a private key is securely stored in a secure authentication IC and a public key is used by the host to verify the authenticity of the peripheral IC
A hardware-based approach provides a more attack-resistant secure authentication platform and it also reduces the time and cost spent on developing this within the host and peripherals
A recommended example of
hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecturerdquo
MAXIM DEEPCOVERSECURE AUTHENTICATORSA recommended example of hardware-based secure authentication is Maxim Integratedrsquos DeepCover family of products which utilizes a host coprocessor and peripheral authenticator architecture For SHA-256 implementations the coprocessor stores the host-side secret securely and performs the SHA-256 computations The microcontroller unit (MCU) sends a random challenge to the coprocessor and authenticator over the I2C interface and the MCU collects the MAC responses from the coprocessor and authenticator for comparison For Maxim ECDSA implementations the coprocessor doesnrsquot need to protect the host-side public key but it does perform the computation-intensive ECDSA computing and reports the result back to the MCU
Implementation of the DeepCover family is simple with options to use Maximrsquos 1-Wire interface to communicate between coprocessor and authenticator The coprocessor has an integrated I2C to 1-Wire bridge 1-Wire authenticators are powered parasitically over the IO pin to further simplify integration on the peripheral side The 1-Wire interface supports multidrop so that multiple 1-Wire authenticators can be used on the same IO bus if the application requires it
SUMMARYSecure authentication of peripheral devices is important to protect customers and OEMs from the use of counterfeit devices Many authentication methods exist but they fail to provide the level of security needed for medical industrial and defense applications Hardware-based secure authentication provides the right balance between security bill-of-materials cost and ease of integration into new and existing designs
Click the icon to watch a video product overview of the Maxim DeepCover Secure Authenticators
Maxim Integrated is an American publicly traded company that designs
manufactures and sells analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products
A Fortune 1000 company Maxim Integrated develops integrated circuits (ICs) for the industrial communications
consumer and computing markets The company which is headquartered
in San Jose California has design centers manufacturing facilities and
sales offices throughout the world The company celebrated its 30th
anniversary in 2013
ldquo
wwwmaximintegratedcomendeepcover-security
For a discussion of how potential counterfeit
medical devices can impact health care see
Tremlet Christophe ldquoHardware Security ICs Offer
Large Security Returns at a Low Costrdquo Electronic
Products 082013 httpwwwelectronicproducts
comSoftwareEDA_Software_and_Hardware
Hardware_Security_ICs_Offer_Large_Security_
Returns_at_a_Low_CostaspxU7wlp0A-eSo also
available as Maxim Integrated application note 5716
at httpwwwmaximintegratedcomAN5716
Learn more about the ECDSA concept its
mathematical background and how the method
can be successfully deployed in practice ldquoUsing
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
effectivelyrdquo by Bernhard Linke httpwww
maximintegratedcomenapp-notesindexmvp
id5767
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
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36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
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TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
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IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
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PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
The increased amount of data and video
being transmitted via the cloud has placed
huge bandwidth and power demands on the
infrastructure market Designers a need a power
partner with the expertise to improve system
efficiency and simplify the design process
Power Modules
Digital Power
Integrated FET Regulators
Switching Regulators
FPGA Power
Hot Plug
Voltage Monitors
Power Sequencers
See Intersilrsquos leadership
power technologies at
intersilcominfrastructure
Go to Intersilcompower-management
WERINGPINFRASTRUCTURE
Download DatasheetRead App NoteOrder Demo BoardWatch Video
intersilcom
bull Integrated high-side low-side FETs
bull Input voltage range 45V to 18V
bull Output voltage adjustable from 08V plusmn1
bull Efficiency up to 95
The ISL850033A are the industryrsquos most efficient 3A synchronous buck regulators
Intersilrsquos new technology delivers the
industryrsquos lowest RDS(ON) performance
24 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
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36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
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TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
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IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
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PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
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PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
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Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
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PULSE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
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PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
25Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
26 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
27Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
To read the previous installment click the image above
Alex LidowCEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)
Previously in this series the advantages of eGaNreg FETs employed in a traditional voltage-mode class D and class E wireless energy transfer were presented In this installment a zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) variation of the voltage-mode class D amplifier will be presented for highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz ISM band wireless energy transfer that will further show how eGaN FETs enable new topologies with dramatic improvements in efficiency and stability
WIRELESS ENERGY-TRANSFER SYSTEMSMany wireless energy-transfer topology solutions have focused on the benefits that a particular topology offers at a specific operating point In reality wireless energy systems experience large coupling and load variations that result in undesirable operating conditions for some topologies Many high-frequency high-efficiency topologies [1 2] make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiency However deviations from the ideal operating conditions for these resonant-based topologies quickly lead to nonideal operating conditions for the devices with associated increase in losses The class E topology is one that is particularly prone to load variations as changes in the load lead to reduced current in the source coil circuit resulting in significant losses in the switching device as it partially loses the zero voltage switching-operating condition For the voltage-mode class D topology the same condition leads to reduced current in the amplifier with corresponding lower losses in the devices This feature of the voltage-mode class D makes it a good candidate for wireless energy systems However due to the output capacitance of the switching devices it has traditionally been operated above resonance [3] to ensure high amplifier efficiency by forcing it to operate under ZVS rather than zero-current-switching (ZCS) conditions A variation of the voltage-mode class D is presented that overcomes this limitation
To simplify the discussion the load rectifier coil set with device-side matching as shown in figure 1 (left) are simplified to a single impedance parameter (Zload) shown in figure 1 (right) This allows the discussion of the topology to focus of the amplifier itself and how various operating conditions affect performance
INTRODUCING ZVS VOLTAGE-MODE CLASS D TOPOLOGY The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology is shown in figure 2 (left) with ideal waveforms (right) Due to the output capacitance (COSS) of the switching devices a nonresonant ZVS tank circuit (LZVS and CZVS) has been provided to self-commutate the switch node This part of the circuit operates as a no-load buck converter and ensures lossless switching for the devices without the need to establish resonance for low-loss operation
The reactive component of ZLOAD is tuned out by resonating it with CS to establish a sinusoidal current for loading the amplifier The peak of the load current does not coincide with the peak of the ZVS current thereby ensuring that the two components of the circuit operate well together and without significantly increasing device-conduction losses
Figure 1 Source coil loop device coil and rectifier circuit (left) with simplified representation (right)
Figure 2 ZVS voltage-mode class D wireless transfer-system schematic (left) with ideal waveforms (right)
ldquoMany high-frequency high-efficiency topologies make use of resonance to establish soft-switching conditions for the devices to yield high efficiencyrdquo
ZLOAD
28 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
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Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
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EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
29Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATIONThe ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system was built for the various devices that were previously compared using the FOM The source coil tuning was fixed using only a series capacitor prior to all tests Several tests were performed on the system The first test operated the amplifier under ideal conditions and was used to determine the peak performance This allowed for easy comparison of the devices The second test operated the system in a load-regulation mode by keeping the output voltage constant and by adjusting the input voltage while the DC load resistance was varied This test is more difficult as it relies on the wireless system for load regulation
Results for the peak efficiency test are shown in figure 4 with the EPC8009 yielding the highest overall efficiency despite having a higher RDS(on) The performance of MOSFET 3 was the worst as it is not a logic-level gate device and required 10V to operate The test was halted once the temperature of the gate driver exceeded 95degC
Load regulation results are shown in figure 5 with the EPC8009 again yielding the highest overall efficiency In this case operation above the DC load design point of 236 Ω yielded a coil impedance that was inductive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the diode conduction region This was due to the coil inductance also contributing to the ZVS current thereby shortening the transition time Operation below the DC load design point resulted in a coil impedance that was capacitive to the amplifier and shifted operation into the partial ZVS mode This was due to the coil capacitance subtracting current from the ZVS circuit thereby increasing the transition time Losses increase exponentially as function of decreasing DC load resistance under these conditions
Figure 4 Measured peak efficiency results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 5 Measured load-regulation performance results for the ZVS class D wireless energy-transfer system
Figure 3 Wireless power figure of merit comparison for the ZVS class D topology
WIRELESS FIGURE OF MERIT (FOM) AND DEVICE COMPARISONeGaN FETs have shown superior performance to MOSFETs in wireless energy-transfer systems [1 2 3] and defining a wireless power figure of merit will simplify the comparison between various devices and technologies [4] In this case the voltage-transition portion of the switching event can be ignored due to the ZVS nature of the amplifiermdasheven when operating conditions deviate from the idealmdashand can be expressed mathematically by equation 1
FOMWPT = RDS(on) bull (QG - QGD) (1)Where RDS(on) = On Resistance of the device [mΩ]
QG = Total gate charge of the device [nC]
QGD = Voltage-transition gate charge of the device [nC]
Better devices have lower values of FOMWPT A comparison between various eGaN FETs and MOSFETs using this FOM is shown in figure 3
ldquoThe temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technologyrdquo
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
30 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
31Visit eewebcom
TECH ARTICLE
36 W
References
1 A Lidow M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of Enhancement-Mode GaN transistors in Class-D and Class-E Wireless Power Transfer Systemsrdquo Bodo Magazine May 2014 pg 56 - 60
2 M A de Rooij ldquoeGaNreg FET based Wireless Energy Transfer Topology Performance Comparisonsrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Europe) May 2014 pg 610 ndash 617
3 M A de Rooij J T Strydom ldquoeGaNreg FET- Silicon Shoot-Out Vol 9 Wireless Power Convertersrdquo Power Electronics Technology July 2012 pg 22 ndash 27
4 D Reusch ldquoImproving System Performance with eGaNreg FETs in DC-DC Applicationsrdquo 46th International Symposium on Microelectronics iMAPS 2 October 2013
5 S-A El-Hamamsy ldquoDesign of High-Efficiency RF Class-D Power Amplifierrdquo IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Vol 9 No 3 May 1994 pg 297 ndash 308
6 M A De Rooij and J T Strydom ldquoIntroducing a Family of eGaNreg FETs for Multi-Megahertz Hard Switching Applicationsrdquo Application Note AN015 September 2013 httpepc-cocomepcdocumentsproduct-trainingAN01520eGaN20FETs20for20Multi-Megahertz20Applicationspdf
7 M A de Rooij ldquoPerformance Evaluation of eGaNreg FETs in Low Power High Frequency Class E Wireless Energy Converterrdquo International Exhibition and Conference for Power Electronics Intelligent Motion Renewable Energy and Energy Management (PCIM - Asia) June 2014 pg 19 ndash 26
The thermal performance for each of the amplifiers operating at maximum power is shown in figure 6 It can clearly be seen that each of the eGaN FET-based amplifierslsquo operation is cooler than any of the MOSFET-based amplifiers Also notable is that the temperature of the eGaN FETs are significantly cooler than the gate drivers which highlights the need for improvements in gate-driver technology In the case of the MOSFET 3 only half the power relative to the other amplifiers could be achieved due to the high temperature of the gate driver Only the eGaN FET-based amplifiers would not require a heat sink over the full range of load resistance
SUMMARYIn this column we presented the ZVS voltage-mode class D topology operating a highly resonant loosely coupled 678MHz wireless energy-transfer system This topology clearly showed that eGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristics The ZVS voltage-mode class D topology yields a high efficiency over a wide DC load operating range without the need for additional dead-time adjustment or active matching and can operated under all conditions without the need for an additional heat sink for the devices
Figure 6 Thermal performance of the various ZVS class D amplifiers
ldquoeGaN FETs not only improve the efficiency of wireless energy systems over those realized using MOSFETs but further help to drive new topologies with desirable characteristicsrdquo
eGaNreg FET is a registered trademark of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
32 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
33Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
IBM FlashSystem products use flash memory not only to store data but also to keep it available As the amount of data rises IBM FlashSystems make enterprise data accessible enabling real-time business decisions
EEWeb spoke with Michael Kuhn vice president and business line executive at IBM Flash Systems as well as Kevin Powell program director also at IBM In addition to differences in storage systems Kuhn and Powell also discussed changes in the data storage market and expectations for the future of flash-based storage
Turn intoDATAFlash Systems
DOLLARS
IBM
IBM FlashSystem V840
Kevin Powell Program Director
IBM Flash Systems
Michael Kuhn VP amp Business Line Executive
IBM Flash Systems
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
34 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
35Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
How has flash memory changed the storage landscape for IBMrsquos enterprise clients
Around 90 percent of the worldrsquos data has been created in the last two years that number is transforming every industry and profession IBM has been at the forefront of helping our clients unlock the business value of this flood of data
Flash memory has been a key component of our efforts to help customers derive greater value at a faster rate from their data With the vast amount of data being created come specific IT challenges inside data centers We work to engineer solutions to these challenges and help our customers turn their data centers into profit centers
mdashMichael Kuhn
What is the true price difference between flash-based storage and traditional hard drives
In the data center there are always multiple considerations Our customers look at storage capacity as well as performance What we see in terms of flash adoption inside enterprise data centers is the importance of not undervaluing the performance components of storage
Many studies show that flash is actually more economical than spinning disks Since our Flash Ahead announcement in April 2013 we have really seen flash at the tipping point There is more than a 30 percent cost reduction by going from
high-speed disks to high-performance flash in terms of total cost of ownership With our new IBMreg FlashSystem V840trade you can actually get the same capacity at the same cost as high-speed disk and gain a five-fold performance increase We are seeing flash deployments that come in lower than high-speed disk in both acquisition costs and overall cost of ownership
mdashMichael Kuhn
How are advantages over high-speed disks achieved
First our customers recognize more than ever that performance matters They are tweaking drives to get the needed performance out of them This lowers efficiency and drives up costs And they often still canrsquot achieve their performance targets When we talk about IBM FlashSystem you get an order of magnitude better performance with no tweaking Secondly from a general cost-of-operation standpoint because response time with flash is much faster thanks to IBM MicroLatencyTM customer applications are working so much more efficiently that you can use fewer servers fewer software licenses and less power for both processing and cooling Lastly with our IBM FlashSystem V840 we include data-efficiency technologies such as IBMreg Real-time Compressiontrade that reduce active data workloads and compress the data technology to get more usable capacity for each terabyte of deployed flash mdashMichael Kuhn
ldquoWith the IBM FlashSystem you get
an order of magnitude better performancemdashwith
no tweakingrdquo
ldquoThere is more than a
30 percent cost reduction by going
from high-speed disks to
high-performance flashrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Michael Kuhn
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
36 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
37Visit eewebcom
INTERVIEW
ldquoOur unique design has given us world-class
numbers from IOPS bandwidth and
latencyrdquo
Were there specific features that were missing from the SSDs that you felt needed to be addressed
Yes absolutely To begin with there is performance in which IOs per second (IOPS) network speeds and latency all matter Latency is very important in IBM FlashSystem because it is the amount of time necessary to navigate through data traffic from point A to point B When you take the easy route with the prepackaged SSD you can get the top-end speeds but once you start putting it behind software the IOPS drop way down We are able to drive latency at speeds of just under 100 microsecondsmdashwhile a typical spinning disk runs at 5 milliseconds 50 times slower Our unique design has given us world-class numbers from IOPS bandwidth and latency which are critical for the types of customer workloads we are seeing today
mdashMichael Kuhn
How is IBM working through the issues with flash
Most people understand flash technology at a high level but in the enterprise data center questions about pricing and endurance continue The difference between our approach and othersrsquo is our innovation from the chip level all the way up Not only does that drive better performance but also better data protection With FlashSystem V840 we are able to put 12 flash modules in a single system and up to 40 flash chips per card within each module We provide IBM Variable Stripe RAIDtrade data protection at the card level and RAID 5 protection at the system level This enables greater efficiency in handling endurance and data protection because we are able to isolate where the cells in a chip might fail
mdashKevin Powell
In which direction do you see flash storage making its next significant evolution
Flash storage is already accelerating a wide range of applications from financial trading to healthcare With large retailers every item is tracked for reordering purposes so they can keep the shelves stockedmdashthatrsquos all been supported by flash technology The enterprise storage industry has been divided between raw capacity to store data and the need for performance storage to actually run businesses using that data Wersquove reached the tipping point where flash offers all of the abovemdashthe capacity the performance and the cost savings Now that platforms such as FlashSystem have achieved this we are going to see flash storage change the landscape in every data center
mdashMichael Kuhn
IBM has designed its own flash systems correct
Yes indeed Only a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build our system from the ground up This enables better performance data protection and density which translate into better business value for clients Others in the industry take a convenient and easier approach because they are less familiar with innovation They target a prepackaged solution a solid-state drive (SSD) which has the same physical format as a hard disk drive (HDD) These storage systems were initially designed for HDDs but they are improved by using SSDs IBM started work with storage systems based on SSDs back in 2008 However we changed that approach because we knew that SSD technology would only carry us so far mdashKevin Powell
Kevin Powell
ldquoOnly a handful of vendors in the industry today do what we at IBM
domdashwe actually buy the NAND flash chips directly from the manufacturer and build
our system from the ground uprdquo
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
38 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
39Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
Calms Sea of Data for
Flash Storage Systems from IBM Help Deal with Data SurplusBy Alex Maddalena Contributing Writer
Jan Janick Vice President Flash Systems and TechnologyIBM
Andy Walls IBM Fellow CTO and Chief Architect Flash SystemsIBM
Analysts project that the amount of data people create is around
44 trillion gigabytes 90 percent of it having been created in the past two years alone At this staggering rate the projected amount of data created by 2020 is expected to surpass 44 trillion gigabytes While the sheer volume of data is hard to comprehend enterprise-storage providers recognize this exponential growth and are developing ways to not only store the endless waves of data but also make the information easily retrievable and protected from unexpected loss
Next-Generation Data Centers
Enterprise FlashIBMrsquos
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
40 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
41Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
TEXAS-STYLE TECHNOLOGY Another approach to getting more life out of flash systems was to invest in tiering software In late 2010 IBMrsquos flash team saw that the prices of flash were at a tipping point thanks to advancements in consumer technology ldquoApplications like online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) got such tremendous benefits out of flash that combined with data reduction you could actually have a system that would be cheaper in terms of total cost of ownershiprdquo Walls remarked With a flash-based enterprise system finally within reach the flash team explored acquisition options which led them to Texas Memory Systems (TMS) As flash technology started maturing and more suppliers were providing SSDs the flash team knew IBM could provide increased performance and decreased latency if they owned the flash controller hardware and firmware and had a storage system built from top to bottom around NAND Flash This brought TMS to the table ldquoThe acquisition allowed us to mix their technology with our storage stack and storage knowledgerdquo Janick explained ldquoWith TMS we could deliver a much better much lower latency solution than if we just put SSDs into our existing storage infrastructurerdquo
Tiering software is the automated progression or
demotion of data across different tiers or types of storage devices and media This movement of data is automatic to the types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements
IBM a longtime storage solutions innovator has been developing flash-based storage solutions for years long before the demand for enterprise-class flash storage systems came to the forefront In 2007 IBM formed a crossband group dedicated to bringing flash storage into the enterprise arena As a result IBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response time significant improvement in real-time compression a lower cost of ownership and a host of other benefits EEWeb had the opportunity to speak with two IBM veterans Andy Walls and Jan Janick about the initial challenges in implementing flash into their storage products as well as how careful strategy and integration propelled them years beyond the competition
FLASH CLASHBoth Walls and Janick have worked for IBM for 33 years with experience in storage systems and desktop and PC development as well as System xreg server organization As inventor of the hard disk drive (HDD) IBM has a unique pedigree of forward-thinking inventions in the storage and server space which is why in 2007 IBM decided to form a flash group for enterprise storage solutions ldquoWe saw that flash because of consumer use had dipped in pricerdquo Walls explained ldquoWe knewrdquo he added ldquothat if we could figure out how to get MLC into the enterprise as the main storage device then we could lead in the industryrdquo
The new flash team was aware that the benefits of solid-state drives (SSD) and flash at that time involved greatly reducing storage response times (latency) which benefited all aspects of the compute environment ldquoWe watched processors memory buses and networking all getting fasterrdquo Janick recalled ldquobut the gap between DRAM and spinning disk just kept getting wider and widerrdquo Implementing flash technologies easily filled this gap but one major problem still needed attention flash wore out over time To solve this issue the IBM team worked closely with suppliers looking at data management techniques and unique controller designs to increase the useful lifespan of flash until it was effective for enterprise deployment
ldquoIBM is ahead of the data curve offering their enterprise customers up to 100-fold improvement in data-search response timerdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
42 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
43Visit eewebcom
FEATURED ARTICLE
BIG BENEFITSWith the flash team energized IBM quickly engineered significant advantages over off-the-shelf SSDs With SSDs which are flash devices constrained by their shape and legacy storage interfaces users experience less than optimal performance IBM made it a point to maximize the performance of their all-flash storage arrays by removing software layers and focusing instead on hardware-oriented architectures ldquoWe have latencies around 100 microsecondsrdquo stated Walls ldquoI havenrsquot seen an SSD system come within a factor of 2 rdquo he claimed ldquoIn general IBM can do twice as much as can be done with other systemsrdquo
Storage performance is also dependent upon workload and bandwidth Users of SSDs with light processing workloads can see reasonable storage performance but as the loads increase SSD performance decreases significantly Conversely IBMrsquos solution can support over a million inputoutput operations per second with the additional benefit of maintaining consistent storage performance and ultralow latency even when writes are added to the task and the queue becomes more saturated ldquoAs measured by the serverrdquo Walls explained ldquowe can get down to 250 microseconds of response time And regardless of the amount of reads versus writes the system is designed to maintain an extremely consistent performance levelrdquo
INSTANT GRATIFICATIONOne IBM customer that has directly benefited from application acceleration is Identity Insights a company that focuses on real-time facial recognition By replacing their spinning disks with IBM FlashSystem Identity Insights was able to see nearly 100 percent improvement in search response times ldquoWe call it instant gratificationrdquo Janick said ldquoand we offered this improvement with no changes to the legacy storage infrastructure and no changes to the application itselfrdquo
The instant gratification crosses over into IBMrsquos database clients as well Many database clients who are unable to cost-effectively power their ever-growing data centers turn to reducing the amount of storage ldquoFlashSystem offers a tremendous decrease in the amount of electricity needed to power the same performance and capacityrdquo Walls stated FlashSystem efficiency not only decreases power consumption but also opens up physical floor space within the data centers offering the clients more room to grow their compute systems ldquoThere is substantial business value that you see almost immediatelyrdquo Walls concluded
IBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arrays With innovative storage systems that leverage the benefits of flash IBM helps enterprises of all types maximize the value they derive from the ever-rising tide of data
While the significant benefits of flash technology are achieved in these IBM systems flash is still not a widely accepted technology in the enterprise arena With massive amounts of data being generated worldwide data reduction technologies such as compression have become increasingly important ldquoWe understand that we need to optimize data compression by 31 or more to close the cost gap between flash and spinning disksrdquo Janick remarked He noted that once the compression shift begins to favor flash over spinning disks flash will be more broadly implemented ldquoFor nowrdquo continued Janick ldquoflash systems are the best solution for application acceleration and optimization of mission critical workloadsrdquo
ldquoIBM FlashSystem already provides significant benefits over traditional spinning disks advantages that earned the flash team Gartnerrsquos first-place ranking in the worldwide share per revenue in all-flash arraysrdquo
IBM FlashSystem V840
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
Your Circuit Starts HereSign up to design share and collaborate
on your next projectmdashbig or small
Click Here to Sign Up
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
46 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
47Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
High-Performance Enterprise NAND Memory Solutions
For data center applicationsmdashincluding cloud computing caching data centers and database applicationsmdashdata accessibility and speed are
dominant concerns Take a look inside memory design issues with Doug Wong senior member of Toshibarsquos technical staff for their Memory Business Unit as he details the advantages of Enterprise NAND as compared to standard systems ldquoReallyrdquo says Wong ldquoEnterprise NAND addresses the marketlsquos need for high endurance and high performancerdquo
Enterprise-Grade NAND Flash from Toshiba Addresses Need for High Endurance and
High Performance
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
48 Visit eewebcom
PULSE
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
49Visit eewebcom
TECH TRENDS
Key Features
Watch Video
Form FactorsEnd-use form factors are typically either an SSD or a card that sits on a bus inside a server Enterprise NAND utilization enables much higher performance than the typical hard-disk drive used in the past
Toggle-Mode NANDldquoEnterprise NAND for Toshiba is high-performance Toggle-Mode NAND plus extended endurancerdquo says Wong To that end Toshiba offers two different product lines SLC and eMLC When compared to standard consumer MLC devices these Enterprise-NAND devices bring extended endurance (extended write-erase cycles) and longer product life
Innovative ChoicesDepending on enterprise requirements Toshiba offers two alternatives the SLC family (64Gb-256Gb) and the eMLC family (128Gb-1Tb) Toggle-Mode 20 DDR NAND supports interface speeds up to 400Mbps
Conclusion
To watch a video overview and demonstration of the Toshiba Enterprise NAND click the image below
ldquoFive years agordquo Wong reflects ldquothe Enterprise NAND class didnrsquot even exist but Toshiba anticipated the need for high-performance NAND and created the Enterprise NAND class for data centers and cloud-computing applicationsrdquo Today the benefits of Enterprise NAND are apparent in high-speed data streaming and Internet access Wong is confident that in the future Toshiba will continue to anticipate needs and develop more NAND solutions
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief
eewebcomregister
Join Today
Safety First
Memoirs of an Analog Designer
Magnet Thief