Semiconductor Engineering: Computing Where Data Resides

Kurt Shuler, Vice President of Marketing at Arteris IP is quoted in this new Semiconductor Engineering article:

Computing Where Data Resides

March 29th, 2021 – By Ann Steffora Mutschler

Computational storage approaches push power and latency tradeoffs.

“Ten years ago solid state drives were new,” said Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP. “There really wasn’t anything like an enterprise SSD. There were little microcontrollers running on platter-type hard drives. That was where semiconductors were then. Since that time, so much has changed. A lot of startups were doing really sophisticated SSD controllers, and the problem initially was that NAND flash consumes itself while it’s operating, so you always have to check the cells. Then, once you find out they’re bad, you must rope them off and tell them not to save anything there anymore. If you buy a 1-terabyte SSD drive, it actually has more than 1 terabyte because it’s grinding itself to death as it operates. For the SSD controllers, that was the initial challenge. But now, storage disk companies have undergone a lot of consolidation. If you look at what’s going on computational storage, we have customers who are doing SSD storage and controllers for the data center that are focused on a particular application, such as video surveillance, so there is computation actually within those controllers that is dealing with that particular use case. That is completely new. Within that computation, you’ll see things like traditional algorithmic, if/then analysis. Then, some of it is trained AI engines. Any of the SSD, enterprise SSD controllers are heading in that direction.”

To read the entire SemiEngineering article, please click here: https://semiengineering.com/computing-where-data-resides/