(bright music) Welcome to "Tech Chat," sponsored by Mouser Electronics. On "Tech Chat," we meet with engineering experts to learn about the latest technical innovations that are shaping and reshaping our world. I'm Dale Wilson, the director of engineering and content for EETech Media and All About Circuits. Today, I'm happy to welcome Mark Noland, technology and alliances manager at Kingston Technology. Welcome to "Tech Chat," Mark.
Oh, thank you. It's great to be on the show. Yeah, it's good to have you here today. So what's our topic for discussion? Kingston has a line of industrial SSDs that are specifically for purpose-made systems and integrators. So we're just gonna go over some of the differences between that and the channel products that people might be more commonly familiar with. Okay. Well I'm looking forward to it.
So let's get started. All righty. This is an overview, looking at some of the features and benefits of it. We have a line of SATA and NVMe drives that are designed specifically for system builders. Some of the differences between this and a channel product that you might find at an e-tailer or regular distributor, these devices have a controlled BOM and firmware. We used to say that there it a locked BOM, but I think that builds some unrealistic expectations because as industry progresses, you can't lock things down for too long.
So we like to call it a controlled BOM and firmware that ensures consistency. So if you spend the time to qualify a device, you wanna be sure that you're gonna have some service out of it instead of having to update and requal frequently, right? We also provide a PCN notification. So minimally 90 days, if any parts change, whether that's the controller or the NAND, which those are things that are most frequent, if any of the parts will change on a device, we'll give you at least 90 days notice longer, whenever we can, plus documentation on all of it. We also provide engineering support with direct access to kinks and FAEs and prequalification through mass production. So basically, our engineering team can be your engineering team.
If you're designing a system, we will work with you and distributors like Mouser to help meet any of the needs that you have and figure out what exactly the right fit for a product for your system. We also have global support. So Kingston has offices and locations around the world.
We can coordinate with ODMs and contract manufacturers worldwide and get them the parts that they need to be able to build and deliver your systems. We also can do failure analysis support. It could be high level, just working with some of the local FAEs in the field, all the way to, if there's something that needs to be figured out, we can take it to the highest level for firmware and hardware support in the Far East. We also provide with all of the minimal warranty for our industrial drives is three years with free technical support.
So Mark, this seems a lot more complicated and a lot more detailed than just me buying a NAND for a laptop or something like that. So what are the applications you're really targeting these at? Well, the market segments, it's funny because this list grows every day. So point of sale system, digital signage, kiosks, network devices, IOT devices.
More and more these days, there's all kinds of AI interface robots and drones and things that are all needing industrial SSDs. You don't want to use a channel product just because the BOM can change, and so the interaction of your application or your OS, slash firmware, might be altered by slight differences between builds and drives. So you want consistency when you're building something like an in-flight entertainment system, you wanna be able to troubleshoot it without having variance of SSDs that might throw a different monkey wrench into the works. So then we're just sort of looking at things that are gonna have maybe a longer lifetime than a commercial or a consumer product, and also just need that longer support, and like you said, everything really needs to be fixed down. Yes sir. So Mark,
you've talked about these applications here and how Kingston, as a company, supports controlling the bill of materials and providing all that FAE support, but how does the industrial SSD itself, as a piece of hardware, is it different from a normal SSD? Well, there's a lot of things go into it. So if you're making SSDs that you're... We have a few SSDs that we sell a million of online per month, several million online per month through e-tail. Because we sell so many of 'em, they might have to be produced in different factories around the world and they might have different controller flavors or NAAN flavors and that just wouldn't be acceptable for, you know, it's fine for a commercial drive that's like an upgrade drive, but you don't want any variability in industrial drives that are gonna be for purpose-built systems. So you're trying to build an appliance that's consistent across the board for all of your products that you build.
And so we have some differentiators of, you know, there's a lot lower capacity. So if you have an appliance and it's running some variant of Linux, that's your firmware OS, you probably don't need a four terabyte SSD. And the cost is very important in trying to mass produce something. So a lot of integrators lean towards lower capacity drives and then having the controlled BOM allows you to know that if you're developing it on this SSD in your R and D project, that it's going to be the same SSD that will be shipping at your contract manufacturer, ODM. And our line of industrial SSDs, we have SATA products and NBME. So like on the SATA side, we have both C-temp and I-temp.
I'll go into I-temp a little bit later, but there's two and a half inch SATA form factor and then M.2 SATA form factors, and both 2280 and 2242 form factors, and then M-SATA. So the M.2 and the two and a half inch, those are available in C-temp and I-temp. The M-SATA is just a C-temp product.
Down below here, we have the M.2 NVME, so these are PCIE devices. Those are available in 2230 and 2280 form factors. You'll notice the biggest capacity that we might have is one terabyte on these devices. So even though you mentioned lower capacity, I mean if you're going up to a terabyte, there's still a lot of capacity in these industrial products.
Most appliances, like your robotic vacuum, probably doesn't want to have a four terabyte SSD in it. If you were doing digital signage, you might want a larger capacity drive, but there are some options for that as well. I guess that's the key point is there are options. Yes. One of the other things that we offer are some customizations and off-menu options.
So our baseline SSDs for industrial products are, they're designed to fit a broad range of needs, but some projects might need a variant of the drive and we try and support customers whenever we can on that. So some of the customizations might be specific firmware tuning to meet customer requirements, and that could be performance or temperature tuning. You might need a custom optimization to the over-provisioning. So say you wanted to have a 128 gig drive, but you want it to last much longer, be more durable. You could take a one terabyte drive and do the OP or over-provisioning to turn it into 128 gig drive, but you basically, you're providing all that extra NAND as extra OP to allow for wear. Drives, when reading is free on an SSD, but writing will put wear on the drive, and so if you want to have something that's gonna last a long time, we can set it up to over-provision it and allow the drive to have a longer lifespan.
We can also work with your engineers to run some testing on that and actually determine what the projected lifespan would be. Another thing we can do is custom drive casing, labeling, or packaging. If somebody needs bulk packs, the drives to be in trays, or if they need other different kinds of packaging, specific to the needs, we can suit that. Well that's very interesting Mark. So just to make sure I understand that correctly with that OP process with the over-provisioning, so if I wanted 128 megabytes and I had a one terabyte, you would just use up the first 128 for a while 'til it's written too many times, and then move to the next 128. That's probably more complex than that, but is that simply how it works? You can do it several ways.
In firmware, you can actually go and say, I wanna take 7% of the drive. So if you have a 1024 gig drive and you say I wanna take 7% of the drive and make that over-provisioning, then you have 1000 gigabytes, basically, that you could work within and you have that extra 7% as an over-provision. Now say that you wanted a drive to last longer, you could take a one terabyte drive and make it 100 gig drive, and so then you have 900 gigabytes of over-provisioning and basically, the controller, it knows about all of the NAND on your device, right? And you can do it, like I said, in several ways. You can do it through partitioning or through over-provisioning in firmware, and either way, it kind of does a very similar thing where if you make a partition that's 100 gigabytes for your OS or firmware, and you don't make any other partitions on the drive, the drive controller still knows about all the NAND and it's gonna go and do wear leveling and use all of the NAND, but it's only going to have a 100 gig partition on there.
And where that partition lives in the actual fiscal NAND chips, it can change. It'll get moved around and migrated around to spread the wear over all the chips. Over-provisioning does a very similar thing, but say that you did a partition, you did it yourself, sort of the easy way. You make a smaller partition as the system architect, but then you hand it over to a system admin, they could go, "Oh there's a one terabyte drive in here, I'm gonna expand the partition to all of it and I'm gonna fill it up with databases and other stuff." In that sort of case, you might end up having the drive used improperly.
If it's a boot drive, you probably don't want to be running SQL server or something like that on there. Wow, that's fascinating. Thanks for that detailed explanation.
Sure. The one last thing that I would add on the customization and off-menu options is that some of the things would require more engineering resources, and be more complex. So there might be a minimum order quantity.
An MOQ might be placed on certain things for engineering the firmware, but our engineering resources are your engineering resources. So we will work with you in any way that we can. And this next section I'm gonna go over basically is just purely about the new I-temp industrial temperature drives.
The purpose of these drives, basically it's similar to the commercial temperature, but these are for more rugged conditions that are hot and cold. I'm gonna go through product definition components, screening and testing, application segments, and the benefits of working with Kingston 'cause we're pretty swell. (Dale chuckles) So our I-temp SSDs, this is a new line for Kingston. Our I-temp SSDs operate between minus 40 and 85 degrees centigrade. I'm not a centigrade person in my head. It's really nice because minus 40 centigrade also happens to be minus 40 Fahrenheit.
So that makes it easy. And then 85 degrees centigrade happens to be 185 degrees Fahrenheit. So that also makes it easy to remember. These are different because commercial grade is typically zero centigrade to 70 centigrade. It's like in the spinal tap.
These are our SSDs that go to 11, but 11 actually means something. One thing that you might notice is that our I-temp drives are only currently available in SATA interface. So we do have a two and a half inch SATA form factor and an M.2 SATA form factor, which is 2280. The capacities are 128 to 56, 512 and 1024 gigabytes. We looked at the marketplace and wanted to get into doing I-temp because we've had a lot of demand for it, and SATA represents over 60% of the market still.
Even though the SATA interface is a little long in the tooth, but in this space, SATA is also very mature and very reliable. It might be slower and have a higher latency than NVME devices. PCIE, NVME, gen four is very fast, and gen five is coming right down the pipe. But SATA is slow and reliable, and it's really not that slow when you think about running an operating system and doing the things that we're trying to do in industrial devices. SATA drives can provide up to 500, 600 megabytes per second. SATA drives can provide up to, reasonably, 550, 650 megabytes per second.
That's more than fast enough to load an operating system or firmware and interact with different industrial devices. Industrial SSD application segments are, it's sort of like a subset of the standard industrial commercial products. Military, transportation, oil and gas, energy sector, mining, offshore marine devices, drones, robots, lots of times it's anything that's in an unpredictable environment. You don't know whether it's gonna be very hot or very cold.
One of the big things that's coming out more and more are edge devices, edge compute, relays for switching and for video streaming. The number of devices at the edge is sort of exploding right now. And so this application segment for industrial temp drives is actually becoming larger every day. Some of the core components for our industrial temp drives, we choose specific parts for these. These are designed for industrial temp, so the PCB, the SATA controller, the NAN flash, thermal sensors, load switch, current limiter, et cetera, all of these are selected specifically for our I-temp drives. We also have firmware enhancements that extend the operating temperature and thermal management for shutdown.
Talking about thermal management on an SSD, the firmware can be designed to throttle the SATA data rate in order to reduce heat if an SSD gets close to reaching its thermal thresholds. Now what that means is your performance, if the drive reaches a critical temperature, it'll be stepped down to lower data rate. You're running less current through the device, you're hopefully reducing the temperature. So if the device is becoming over temp because of its data use, it'll reduce more until the thermal throttling actually sees that the temperature is leveling off. But if the data throttling doesn't handle it, it knows that it's probably from an external source, and so before the drive becomes hot and critical and could lose data, the drive will go and shut itself down. The drive will thermal throttle and then get to the point where it does a safe shutdown, and that'll help protect the data on the drive.
Well that's really interesting Mark 'cause you're talking about changes to the firmware, but you're also, on that previous slide, you're talking about changes to almost every piece of the component that goes into building these things. So it might look very similar to staring at the the SATA drive, but in reality, everything on it almost is different. Yeah.
We do design them based off of some other products because we build a lot of SSDs, but then we will take this prime example of one of the SSDs that we want to model it off of and then we will go and choose specific elements to go onto this drive. We have 100% screening for low and high temperature, industrial grade controllers. We have 100% screening for the industrial grade NAN flash that goes on these devices, and then we actually do testing and we do a high and low temperature testing in thermal chambers. So we will bring these down to minus 40 degrees, then we'll bring them up to 85 degrees and ensure that they actually meet the standards. We also do shock and vibration testing.
Well that's really a lot of testing for a memory component, and I guess it just goes back into the applications that you're targeting here. Those really need to know that these are gonna work and they're gonna be reliable across a broad range of difficult, harsh environments. That's true.
One of the things that you may or may not know about Kingston though is that we actually test 100% of the SSDs in memory that we ship, whether they're commercial, industrial, or our channel products, 100% of what we produce is tested. Certain elements have different testing, like we don't do high and low temperature testing for our channel products. Those tests are specific to the industrial I-temp products, but we do test our commercial drives at zero to 70, and the I-temp from minus 40 to 85 degrees C.
One of the features that our I-temp devices have that's not in our commercial grade products are the 256 bit AES encryption. All of these I-temp drives are self encrypting drives. They're capable of that.
They also provide TCG Opal 2.0 support in the firmware. They also support Microsoft's e-drive. We do have encryption on these drives available.
This can make a big difference. It's one of those things that if encryption is on the checklist, it's important. Sometimes, whether somebody uses it or not, sometimes it's just important to have the encryption there, but we support everything across the board from AES opal and even e-drive. So Kingston has a commitment to quality.
We've been in the industry over 36 years, manufacturing memory and storage. We have patents on testing for both memory and SSDs. If you ever get a chance to take a tour, we have our facility in Orange County where we have some SMT lines and do manufacturing here.
If you go to Hsinchu in Taiwan, talk to us and we'll get you a tour there as well. But Kingston products go through 100% of testing and burn-in before leaving the factory. This is not something that is standard across the industry, but we've just made it part of our manufacturing process, and what this does is it essentially eliminates this bathtub effect where if a new electronic product has its highest failure rate in the first three months, and after five years, we basically cut that off at the front.
So we weed out anything that's going to have any failures in the beginning because of our testing process that's integrated in the manufacturing process, from beginning to end, until it goes into packaging to ship to customers. We also have amazing customer support, globally. If you call Kingston for support, if you're working with a industrial distributor, you'll call your industrial distributor.
The industrial distributor will call the account executive that handles that, and if there's any technical issues, it'll go immediately to our engineering team. Say like one of your engineers doesn't know to call, go through the distributor, and they actually call the 800 number for Kingston, they'll talk to a Kingston employee and this person will actually get back to the engineering department who will notify the account exec with your distributor. We have, I think, a huge advantage just because we do our own technical support. We try and make it as simple and easy and supportive to our customers in getting what they need.
Well Mark, speaking as an engineer, they used to build hardware and stuff that having that kind of background support when things do go wrong, you want to get questions answered to help you solve problems. It's just so much better than being hung out to dry and have to figure it out yourself. It's funny, it's like a really big mom and pop shop. One of the questions you might have about this is, does Kingston use industrial grade components in their I-temp SSDs or screen components? We use industrial temp rated, flash controller DRAM, and passive components, but we do screen the NAN flash ourselves.
This is because we're actually, in most cases, we try and process wafers. So rather than buy the NAN flash or DRAM that we use for our memory, as cut chips, we actually prefer to buy the wafers. We've been processing wafers for decades and so we're very good at it.
We can keep the cost down. We also know the quality of everything because we've been responsible for testing it. This screening is not new to Kingston. We've been doing it for decades, like I said. I-temp SSDs are designed, from a hardware and firmware perspective, to operate reliably at higher and lower temperature ranges. So you know that you're going to get the expected range of temperature out of it if it's on the label because we've actually tested that product and burned it in, making sure that it functions as an operating device in those temperature ranges, both high and low.
As we near the end of today's "Tech Chat," Mark, are there any final thoughts you'd like to share with our audience? I want everyone to know that we have dedicated industrial sales team, so our customers have direct access to our SSD sales team for product information. That's engineers, salespeople, we have dedicated business managers on our SSD products that are looking at industry trends and keep the pricing updated. We'll let you know what the future timeline is for products availability and capacities and technical details. We also have a dedicated industrial field application team.
Those people are available for the end users and distributors. We can help solve your problems. We can put on a hat and be part of your team to try and get the solution that you need to work for your product.
Well, excellent. Thanks Mark. I know I learned a lot today, and I think our audience will find it very beneficial. Well, terrific. I really appreciate the time and everybody checking the video out.
Wanna let you know, if you do have questions, feel free to reach out to Kingston. We're here to support you. Before we end today's "Tech Chat," we wanna thank our friends at Mouser Electronics. If you're looking to purchase any of these great Kingston technology products, please head over to Mouser.com to help them continue to support educational presentations just like this one. And join us again next time on "Tech Chat" where we chat with the leading technical experts, like Mark Noland, from industry leading innovators, like Kingston Technology, who are changing our world every day.
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2024-08-01