Microsemi Corporate- Experts & Thought Leaders

Microsemi Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microchip Technology Inc., announced sampling availability of its Switchtec Gen 4 PCIe switches, enabling customers to build next-generation high performance, low latency interconnect solutions in high growth markets including machine learning, data centre servers and storage equipment. The new generation of PCIe switches, which offer high density and reliability as well as low power, provide customers a quick time to market solution with field-proven Switchtec firmware and a chip architecture enabling significant re-use of customers’ investments in Switchtec management software, drivers, firmware and system design. Highly reliable solution “Server, storage and general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) architectures are increasingly growing their use of PCIe infrastructure and our new Switchtec Gen 4 PCIe switches provide a high-reliability solution to address this increasing demand,” said Andrew Dieckmann, vice president of marketing and applications engineering for Microsemi’s Data Center Solutions business unit. The Switchtec Gen 4 PCIe switches are GPU-optimised with low pin-to-pin latency and low latency variation for optimal machine learning workload performance “With significant intellectual property reuse from our Gen 3 to Gen 4 PCIe switches, our customers can leverage much of their Switchtec management software, drivers, firmware, and development tool investments—providing a lower risk, quicker time to revenue solution.” Integrated high-performance DMA engine The Switchtec Gen 4 PCIe switches are GPU-optimised with low pin-to-pin latency and low latency variation for optimal machine learning workload performance. Other features include up to 100 line-rate capable PCIe lanes as well as an integrated high-performance cut-through direct memory access (DMA) engine. High-reliability features include hot- and surprise-plug support, end-to-end data integrity and best-in-class debugging with the ChipLink diagnostics tool. “Data centre architectures are increasingly growing their use of PCIe infrastructure due to its high performance and low latency benefits,” said Ogi Brkic, General Manager, Radeon Professional Graphics - AMD. “We’re pleased to see the Gen4 PCIe switching investment by Microsemi to strengthen the ecosystem and drive broader deployment of PCIe solutions.”

Microsemi Corporation, a global provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, has announced interoperability between its 12 gigabits per second (Gbps) SAS/SATA host bus adapters (HBAs) and redundant array of independent disk (RAID) adapters, including the Microsemi Adaptec HBA 1100, SmartHBA 2100 and SmartRAID 3100, part of its Smart Storage adapters portfolio, and AMD’s EPYC processor series. Data centre customers looking for a storage adapter solution for EPYC processor deployments can now utilise Microsemi’s full suite of Smart Storage solutions with confidence as a fully compatible end-to-end solution.  “As AMD-based processors are increasingly being considered for next-generation server deployments in cloud data centres, extensive interoperability testing between our companies has shown our feature-rich high performance Smart Storage adapters to be a powerful storage solution when paired with AMD’s EPYC processors,” said Pete Hazen, vice president and general manager of storage solutions at Microsemi. “We are pleased to work closely with a well-respected industry leader, as this collaboration provides data centre customers with the confidence to make Microsemi their first call when looking to adopt AMD’s unique EPYC processors.” The server processor market is experiencing tremendous change as workloads and applications continue to evolve" High performance and flexibility Market research firm IDC recently reported the worldwide server market grew nearly 20 percent in the third quarter of 2017, reaching $17 billion and trending even higher than the same research firm’s long-term forecast of 4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2015-2020. The Microsemi Smart Storage platform, which leverages the company’s unified Smart Storage Stack, is optimised for a variety of server storage applications for data centres, server original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and server original design manufacturers (ODMs) due to its high performance and flexibility. “The server processor market is experiencing tremendous change as workloads and applications continue to evolve, consuming more memory bandwidth and I/O than ever before,” said Raghu Nambiar, CVP and CTO of Datacenter Ecosystems and Application Engineering, AMD.  Security partnerships “This is where the AMD EPYC processor stands apart, delivering leading performance and scale for cloud and enterprise customers. Now these customers can benefit from Microsemi’s feature-rich Adaptec Smart Storage technologies combined with the AMD EPYC processor to help them achieve new levels of total cost of ownership savings in the data centre.” The Accelerate Ecosystem is designed to reduce time-to-market for end customers and time-to-revenue for Microsemi and ecosystem members AMD collaborates with Microsemi as part of Microsemi Accelerate Ecosystem, which facilitates collaboration between Microsemi and leading firms in the semiconductor integrated circuit (IC), intellectual property (IP), systems, software, tools and design spaces to integrate, test and deliver pre-validated designs and system-level solutions for end customers in Microsemi’s key vertical markets—aerospace and defense, data centre, communications and industrial. The Accelerate Ecosystem is designed to reduce time-to-market for end customers and time-to-revenue for Microsemi and ecosystem members via technology alignment, joint marketing and sales acceleration.  Smart storage adapters The Microsemi Adaptec HBA 1100, as well as the company’s SmartHBA 2100 and SmartRAID 3100, leverage the unified Smart Storage Stack. The combination of its Unified Smart Storage Stack, SmartRAID and SmartHBA, HBA product families and Microsemi SXP family of SAS expanders provide a complete server solution for storage management and connectivity. Each family has unique differentiating features. The HBA 1100 is optimised for SDS, cloud storage and raw high-performance connectivity. It also includes: Adapters with up to 24 ports using 28nm SAS/SATA-optimised silicon, offering an optimal power profile for the target applications Support for host-managed and host-aware SMR drives Broad OS driver support, including inbox driver support Performance of up to 1.7 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) SmartHBA 2100 is industry's only basic RAID solution with more than eight portsOptimised for SDS applications The SmartHBA 2100 is optimised for SDS applications which desire hardware RAID for OS boot drives as well as entry-level RAID for SMBs. It also provides: Basic RAID without compromising on the requirement for a fully featured and functional HBA, which is required for multi-path IO and SDS applications Mixed mode enables drives to be independently configured as raw drives or as part of a logical volume True hardware RAID for RAID 0,1,10 and RAID 5 Industry's only basic RAID solution with more than eight ports Enterprise storage The SmartRAID 3100 is optimised for enterprise storage applications which require the highest level of data availability and data centre applications which benefit from caching. It also features: Adapters with up to 24 ports using 28nm SAS/SATA-optimised silicon, offering an optimal power profile for the target applications Zero Maintenance Cache Protection (ZMCP) with a cache size of up to 4GB and integrated cache backup circuitry for optimal cost, thermal performance and operating efficiency Board options without cache backup maxCache 4.0 included on all adapters with up to ~2TB SSD cache Roadmap to maxCrypto controller-based encryption

Microsemi Corporation, a provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, today announced enhancements to its Switchtec PCIe advanced Fabric Switch (PAX), which now provides high-performance fabric connectivity and composability for multi-host graphics processing unit (GPU) and NVMe solid state drive (SSD) systems. Microsemi will be showcasing a demonstration of the new device during the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit March 20-21, 2018 in San Jose, California. As the use of GPUs for deep learning, artificial intelligence and machine learning make groundbreaking improvements in areas of image classification, speech recognition, autonomous driving, bioinformatics and video analytics, the need for efficient parallel GPU computing continues to grow. Microsemi’s Switchtec PCIe advanced fabric switches provide a scalable, low-latency and cost-effective multi-host interconnect for a network of GPUs, NVMe SSDs and other PCIe endpoints. Flexible fabric interconnect The Switchtec PAX product can be used to create a flexible fabric interconnect to a shared pool of GPUs and/or NVMe SSDs using standard operating system drivers. System management is simplified through a fabric application programming interface (API), significantly reducing time to market and development cost for multi-host systems. “Our Switchtec PAX switch enables GPU resources to be allocated to match workload requirements and maximise efficiency,” said Andrew Dieckmann, vice president of marketing for data centre solutions at Microsemi. “Using the dynamic partitioning and multi-host SR-IOV sharing features available on our Switchtec PAX switches, GPU resources can be ‘composed’ or dynamically allocated to a specific host or set of hosts in real-time using standard host drivers.” Machine learning applications According to market research firm IndustryARC, the GPU machine learning market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 38 percent till 2024. The firm also notes advanced technologies such as low power consumption, high throughput and flexibility will drastically increase the adoption of machine learning applications across the globe.  Microsemi’s PAX advanced fabric PCIe switch will be showcased during the OCP Summit March 20-21, 2018 at the Hilton San Jose. Dynamic allocation from a pool of GPUs and NVMe SSDs over a PCIe fabric to multiple hosts will be demonstrated. Switchtec PAX Family Features Microsemi's Switchtec PAX family comprises switches from 96 lanes to 24 lanes, providing: High-performance PCIe fabric connectivity overcoming the limitations of the PCIe Specification for multi-host systems Multi-host sharing of SR-IOV NVMe SSDs, GPUs and other PCIe endpoints Virtualisation of host PCIe domains and SR-IOV endpoints Software development kit (SDK) for virtualisation of SR-IOV endpoints, and for enclosure management One of the industry’s most flexible port bifurcation, from x2 to x16 lanes per port High port density, with up to 48 ports Advanced error reporting Error containment for surprise-plug and unplug to prevent system crashes Advanced diagnostics and debug features to identify, diagnose and fix problems Separate Refclk Independent SSC (SRIS) for cabled PCIe and lower cost system designs