A Look Back at 2024: Phison Garners Industry Recognition, Creates Buzz Around “World Firsts” and Innovative Partnerships

By Loreta Tarozaite| Dec 23, 2024| All, Featured, News

This year Phison made great strides in the data storage sector, launched its new Pascari Enterprise SSD product line and made LLM training affordable for businesses of all sizes-while forming valuable partnerships and winning major kudos along the way.

2024 was an incredible year for Phison in several critical ways, with industry events, new product launches, fresh partnerships and industry recognition that further cemented the company's status as a world leader in SSD controllers and other data storage solutions.

New Pascari brand SSDs enable enterprises to reap the benefits of AI and other advanced technologies

One of the most exciting milestones for Phison in 2024 was the launch of its new Pascari brand of Enterprise SSDs designed specifically for enterprise and data center applications. As AI and other technologies evolve, organizations need higher-performance storage solutions that allow them to efficiently manage massive data sets and intensive workloads.

The Pascari lineup featured the flagship X200 Series SSD, Phison's inaugural PCIe Gen5 Enterprise SSD that is setting new industry standards for performance and efficiency. In addition to the mixed-workload X-Series, the lineup includes AI-Series, AI SSDs that are used in Phison's aiDAPTIV+ solution; Data Center D-Series for consistent performance and reliability in data-intensive environments; SATA S-Series; and Boot Drive B-Series.

"Phison's introduction of Pascari underscores the company's commitment to fostering rapid advancements in enterprise innovation," said Jeff Janukowicz, SSD Research Vice President at IDC. "By establishing an enterprise brand for Phison Enterprise SSDs, it enhances customer value by offering storage technologies designed for swift deployment in next-generation data centers, tailored to maximize efficiency. The launch of X200 showcases Phison's expertise in delivering products that align with the evolving dynamic needs of the market."

Taiwan Excellence Award honors Phison

In January, Phison was honored to receive a Taiwan Excellence Award from the Taiwan International Trade Administration (TITA) and Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). The award is given each year to a select group of products that are manufactured in Taiwan and demonstrate outstanding technical innovation and real, life-changing impact.

While TITA and TAITRA honor a range of industries, Phison was the winner in the Electronics and Communication category. The winning product was the company's E22T, a PCIe Gen4 SSD controller IC created specifically for advanced automotive applications. The E22T can run within a wider temperature range than its competitors, which is an obvious benefit when it comes to automotive applications that might have to operate in many different environments at extreme temperatures. This is the second consecutive win for Phison, which was also awarded the Taiwan Excellence Award in 2023 for its customizable X100platform.

A Phison "World's First" premiered at CES

Phison attended CES and showcased a range of solutions that pushed the boundaries of performance, power efficiency and reliability. Especially noteworthy was the Phison PS5026-E26 Max14um, a PCIe Gen5 E26 controller with I/O+ technology. It has the distinction of being the world's first controller with 14 GB/s sustained sequential read performance and over 1000 MB/s in all PCMark 10 and 3Dmark storage tests. Almost a year later, the E26 is still considered the world's fastest consumer SSD on the market.

Another hit at the show was the Phison PS5031-E31T, a low-power PCIe Gen5 controller with a 4-channel DRAMless design offering up to 10.3 GB/s performance and 8 TB maximum capacity. This controller will be a major contender in what Michael Wu, President and General Manager of Phison US, calls "the next battleground for PCIe Gen5, mainstream desktops and notebooks." Wu says the E31T could revolutionize the market with 10 GB/s performance without heatsinks or additional cooling requirements.

First quarter launches continue

Phison launched a full range of Universal Flash Storage (UFS) controllers that enable the entire gamut of smartphones, from entry-level to the most premium and flagship devices, to enhance user experiences with maximum mobile storage performance. UFS delivers data transfer speeds up to three times faster than eMMC storage devices while consuming less energy. The UFS product line ranges from the PS8327, the industry's smallest UFS 2.2 controller with the highest performance-to-cost ratio in history, to the premium UFS 4.0 PS8361, which meets the highest requirements for flagship smartphones and offers twice the performance of UFS 3.1 devices.

To meet the demand for stable performance and power loss protection in a growing data storage use case, Phison launched a range of specialized SSD storage solutions for video and surveillance systems. The products, which include the mid-to-high-range S12DI and the cost-effective S17T SSDs, deliver sustained write performance to prevent dropped video frames; power loss protection to ensure data isn't lost during a power outage; and reliability and durability features that support continuous intensive data writing for extended periods.

aiDAPTIV+ partnerships address AI pain points for SMBs

While Phison launched its groundbreaking aiDAPTIV+solution for training and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) in 2023, it enhanced the solution's possibilities and scope with a number of strategic partnerships:

• MAINGEARPro AI Series workstations running Phison aiDAPTIV+ will enable users to train AI LLMs without the excessive up-front costs of traditional LLM training infrastructure.

• ASUShas integrated aiDAPTIV+ into its data center solution to give customers AI capabilities at a lower price.

• GIGABYTE's AI servers now include aiDAPTIV+ capabilities for AI model fine-tuning.

• The MediaTekDaVinci generative AI platform now leverages aiDAPTIV+ trained data to give small and medium businesses the ability to retain control over their data from training to execution.

• Advantechis seamlessly integrating aiDAPTIV+ technology into its Edge AI solutions to enable customers in edge and industrial sectors to amplify AI LLM capabilities.

Computex features more "World's First" milestones

In addition to showcasing the new Pascari line of Enterprise SSDs, Phison showcased a range of solutions to demonstrate innovative and advanced technologies:

• aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite, Phison's flagship LLM training toolset that offers the world's first affordable end-to-end GenAI experience. This suite processes data from ingress to inference, providing a comprehensive on-premises AI solution for businesses, universities and government agencies.

• The world's first mainstream SSD to achieve speeds of up to 10 GB/s, the Phison PCIe Gen5 DRAM-less E31T SSD.

• The world's first native USB 4.0 single-chip controller, the U21-which provides excellent transfer performance of 4GB/s for both reads and writes.

aiDAPTIV+ technology wins "Best of Show" at FMS

In August, Phison had another exciting lineup of advanced technology and solutions to show at FMS: The Future of Memory and Storage event in Santa Clara, California. The company was thrilled to receive a "Best of Show, Most Innovative AI Application" award for its aiDAPTIV+ technology. A press release about the award stated that aiDAPTIV+ "received this honor for its groundbreaking innovation that empowers users with limited resources to train large language models. The end-to-end AI appliance solution has been recognized for allowing system integrators to build turn-key large language model training systems from start to successful finish. With an easy-to-use user experience that turns raw data into tokenized data, aiDAPTIV+ runs the fine-tuning processwith Llama-3 70B precision and offers the ability to ask questions about the data, all from a local domain on premises."

Pascari Enterprise SSDs impress crowds at industry events

Phison attended the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in October and received coveted OCP Inspired™ recognition for its Pascari D200V QLC and X200 TLC SSDs. That means the drives are among the elite products that comply with OCP's stringent specifications and can be obtained on the OCP Marketplace. Phison's Director of Product Architecture, Imran Hirani, noted, "This recognition from OCP for Pascari drives marks a significant milestone of third-party validation as a trusted NAND services and solutions provider already in use by the top ODM, OEM and enterprise companies. We are honored to earn OCP Inspired™ status to continue to deliver Pascari products that keep pace with modern data centers and accelerate AI technologies."

The buzz around Pascari Enterprise SSDs grew exponentially at the Super Computing 2024 (SC24) event in November. That's where Phison announced the Pascari D205V SSD, the world's first PCIe Gen5 122.88 TB data center class SSD. With the D205V, Pascari offers a single drive with a four-to-one capacity advantage over traditional cold storage hard drives while shrinking both physical footprint and OPEX costs. It's beefy enough to handle the most data-intensive workloads that AI, machine learning, real-time analytics or high-performance computing can throw at it. It's the ideal data storage for today's ever-increasing data deluge.

Also at SC24, Phison teamed up with VDURA to feature the ultra-high-capacity Pascari D205V SSD and VDURA's "world's strongest platform." The partners sponsored the world's largest data lift, performed by strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, best known for his role as "The Mountain" in HBO's "Game of Thrones." Björnsson lifted a bar attached to large stacks of D205V SSDs representing 288 PB of data and weighing nearly 1,000 pounds.

Another "World's First": Phison achieves prominent automotive certification

As Phison continues its research and development in automotive solutions, it is always working to expand its expertise and qualifications. In November, the company was pleased to announce it had received ISO/SAE 21434 certification-and was the world's first NAND controller independent supplier to do so. That means Phison's NAND controllers and their development process are compliant with global automotive cybersecurity standards. ISO/SAE 21434 is an international framework and guidance for suppliers to fortify protection against external hacking, a security safeguard that is becoming increasingly critical in the automotive industry.

Phison prepares for even greater success in 2025

As Phison closes out 2024 and looks toward the coming year, the company will continue to make research and development a priority. We will deliver further advancements in SSD performance and efficiency, AI and other data storage solutions that empower customers to make the most of evolving and emerging technologies. Phison has gained momentum and has a host of new, exciting products ready to show in 2025 with the first kickoff event at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, January 7-10. See you there!