Flash memory drives introduced with SEU mitigation for remote applications

SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. has announced a proprietary technology to mitigate the adverse impact of single-event upsets (SEUs) in high-reliability flash-memory-based systems. SMART Modular's MP3000 NVMe SSD products with SEU mitigation decrease annual failure rates from as high as 17.5k/Mu (million units) to less than 10/Mu and can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in possible service costs by helping to ensure hundreds of hours of uninterrupted uptime, particularly important for tough-to-repair remote deployments.  

"Our industry-standard SATA and PCIe NVMe boot drives can slash annual failure rates by as much 99.7% by recovering from soft errors due to single event upsets," states Satya Iyer, SMART's vice president of speciality memory. "In networking and telecom applications in remote and hard-to-service locations, SEU mitigation and the ability to recover from soft errors can make the difference for systems that require 24/7 uptime."  

SEUs are an inadvertent change in 'bit status' that occurs in digital systems when high-energy neutrons, or alpha particles, randomly strike and cause bits in memory – logic components – to flip their state. These high-energy particles can originate from terrestrial or extraterrestrial sources such as cosmic rays. SEUs can lead to abnormal operation of digital systems or total system failure. Addressing these errors or upsets within the SSD allows recovery without needing a full system reboot, which is critical in maintaining reliable operations and uninterrupted runtimes.  

The SEU mitigation technology is superior to other solutions that simply rely on ECC for the internal SRAM. By gracefully rebooting itself without a host system reboot, the SSD also handles possible flipped bits in other components within the SSD, which might account for an additional 10% of failures. Designed for applications that demand maximum uptime, these boot drives with SEU mitigation have storage capacities ranging from 60GB to 1.92TB and are offered in commercial and industrial temperature grades.  

The ME2 SATA  M.2 and mSATA drives with SEU mitigation supply 60GB to 1.92TB of storage and are available in commercial grades (operating temperature: 0C to 70C) and industrial grades (operating temperature: -40C to 85C). The M.2 2280 also supports SafeDATA power loss data protection.  

The MP3000 NVMe PCIe drives with SEU mitigation provide 80GB to 1.92TB of storage in M.2 2280, M.2 22110, and E1.S form factors. They are available in commercial temperature grades (operating temperature: 0C to 70C) and industrial temperature grades (operating temperature: -40C to 85C). They also support SafeDATA power loss data protection.