Highly automated hardware and firmware RAID SoC design optimized for memory class storage devices

Today, solid state drives (SSDs) which is as a memory class storage device are widely used due to their superior performance over hard disk drivers (HDDs). This trend brings a new challenge to the design of storage adapters which are used to connect a host computer system to peripheral storage I/O devices. In this paper, we propose a joint hardware and firmware architecture and present a System-on-Chip (SoC) based on this architecture. This SoC is for the new generation of IBM RAID adapter that attains higher I/Os per seconds (IOPS). Several key novel aspects which are used to maximize the performance of the RAID storage adapter will be introduced in detail, including various hardware offload and accelerators as well as such as a firmware performance path design. The overall architecture and technologies are silicon proved in FPGA and ASIC. © 2013 IEEE.