EEWeb Pulse - Issue 88

EEWeb Issue 88

March 5, 2013

John Scaramuzzo President SMART Storage Systems TECHNICAL ARTICLE

VHDL101 Introduction

TECHNICAL ARTICLE

Flash Endurance Enhancement Technologies

Electrical Engineering Community

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

John Scaramuzzo

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PRESIDENT OF SMART STORAGE SYSTEMS A conversation with the president of SMART Stroage Systems about their smart and costeffective way of creating SSDs.

Featured Products

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Flash Endurance Enhancement Technologies Driving the Shift to SSD-Driven Data Centers

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BY JOHN SCARAMUZZO WITH SMART STORAGE SYSTEMS A look at why the technology industry is looking to SSDs to solve new data center challenges and what manufacturers are doing to make Flash more accessible and cost-effective.

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VHDL 101 - Introduction

BY PAUL CLARKE WITH EBM-PAPST How learning the VHDL programming language can expose you to the world of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays.

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Tindie: A Maker Marketplace

BY KAREN KOHTZ WITH EEWEB Emile Petrone saw a need for an electronics makerspace, and so he founded Tindie.com.

Product Overview: TI DRV8301 Motor Kit

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RTZ - Return to Zero Comic

30 Visit www.eeweb.com

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John

Scaramu SMART Storage Systems is a leading solid-state storage device company based out of Newark, California. The company’s primary market is enterprise storage devices and servers and also provides for secondary markets such as defense and aerospace. We spoke with John Scaramuzzo, the President of SMART Storage Systems, about the company’s smart and efficient way of manufacturing devices, their groundbreaking Guardian technology, and how increasing the endurance of the products helps them remain an industry leader in SSDs.

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INTERVIEW

uzzo SMART

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S Y S T E M S

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EEWeb PULSE How did you become interested in storage devices?

The truth is—I was in my Advanced Electronics class in my senior year of college and my teacher came in and asked, “Who wants to work at Digital?” So I raised my hand. It turns out it was a storage group who knew the professor who was looking for hires and I got that job. You could say that I got into the storage industry by raising my hand.

Digital was huge back in the 80s and at the time, a lot of the big computer companies also made their own storage devices. It was at a transition period where these big computer companies all got rid of their storage companies— and we were one of them. In 1994, Quantum Corporation bought the storage division of Digital. It was a great era of transition for storage, especially in hard drives. Hard drives went from being these giant 14-inch monsters that looked more like washing machines than storage devices. The first projects I started working on were considered the small hard drives, which were 5 ¼ inch disk drives. I think by the time we got to Quantum in ’94 we were

down to 2 ½ inch disk drives, which we still have.

What made you switch from hard drives to SSDs?

Back then, everything was enterprise because everything was in the computer realm. I continued to work on enterprise-focused storage. I did that up until 2001 when Maxtor bought Quantum. Maxtor was really looking to build up their enterprise storage group, which is what we were already doing, so we really worked to build up the business and I ended up becoming GM of the storage division and got up to a million units a quarter. That led up to an acquisition by Seagate in 2006, in which I joined Seagate as Head of Quality and ultimately ran the enterprise storage division for them.

The funny thing about this is that my five year work certificate was signed

by Ken Olson from Digital Equipment Corporation, my ten year was signed by Michael Brown at Quantum Corporation, my 15 year was signed

by Mike Wingert at Maxtor, my 20 year was signed by Bill Watkins at Seagate—and I didn’t have to change my phone number!

Starting in 2008, there was some buzz about SSDs. Flash was invented basically the day I started working in hard drives. From that point forward, everyone assumed that flash was going to take over hard drives. After 20 years of hearing it, you tend to get a little skeptical that the new technology is really going to take over. But yet again, we were hearing it starting in the late 2000s, that yes, flash was going to take over hard drives. As a hard drive guy, the first reaction is, “No way!

I’ve heard this before and it’s not going to happen.” Ultimately, by the time I was at Seagate, I was asked to run the SSD division of Seagate and it forced me to really look at the technology in depth. I went into it very skeptically and then by the time I got done with the analysis, both technical and market, I was 100% convinced that SSDs were going to take over enterprise and take over storage.

I’ve been in enterprise storage since day one until I started at SMART Storage Systems three years ago.

That really was the transformation for me—being forced to really go in and look at what this disruptive technology is going to do and could do and why this time it wasn’t just another threat, it was real. With that, I wanted to move really fast with SSDs and SMART Storage Systems didn’t exist at this point, it was SMART Modular Technologies.

SMART Modular Technologies was looking for someone to run a group that would build enterprise SSDs, and I felt qualified for that role and felt very excited about the market.

SMART Storage Systems was providing a great platform -- a stable OEM-focused company of over 20 years with a great reputation, so I thought it would be a great place to build a storage company, so I joined SMART Storage Systems in 2010.

“Flash was invented basically the day I started working in hard drives.

From that point forward, everyone assumed that flash was going to take over hard drives.”

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INTERVIEW Could you tell us more about SMART Storage Systems?

Having the advantage of being in the storage field for my entire career, you really get to understand what the storage customers need, especially the top tier-one OEMs. You understand the needs from a technology perspective, from a quality perspective, and from a support perspective. Storage is a very interesting ecosystem because every bit counts—especially enterprise. It’s a little bit less intensive if you’re in a laptop and are running videos or pictures or whatever, but if your storage device is in a Deutsche Bank system, it has to work, which is the mentality of the enterprise, which really separates it from client consumer and also separates it from the memory industry.

What I recognized years ago was that there were hundreds of “SSD” companies being formed, most being formed from the memory side of the world and now it’s because flash is another memory unit— whether it’s a DRAM unit or a flashunit—it was looked at and treated as memory. Flash got its start in the consumer world, so enterprise storage is something very new to flash and very new to vendors who have traditionally made memory devices. Part of the difference is, in a memory device, you don’t store any bites—you have to make sure that it runs and that it’s good quality. The implications of losing data are not the same in dynamic memory as they are in non-volatile memory. At the time, my view of the world was, you have flash and memory companies that understood flash and memory, but didn’t really understand storage.

You had storage companies, like Seagate and Hitachi, that understood storage, but didn’t really understand

“The concept for SMART Storage Systems was to put together expertise in flash and expertise in storage and focus on SSDs.” flash. The concept for SMART Storage Systems was to put together expertise in flash and expertise in storage and focus on SSDs. SMART had acquired Adtron Corporation, which was an SSD company, back in 2008 and then when I joined in 2010, I built the storage side of it through my connections in the industry and understanding the talent required for the project. We are about 50/50 now with flash and storage, which is a unique combination in the industry.

What is the Guardian technology?

Guradian is really key to what we do and part of it is this marriage between flash and storage. If you look at the flash world and traditional SSD world, SSDs are built out of flash or a different type of flash, whether it’s MLC, eMLC (Enterprise eMLC) or single-level cell SLC. The way that the SSD industry has built SSDs is, to say, the SSD has whatever capability that the flash has built with has. So, if it’s MLC, it has a certain level of endurance and performance or if it’s eMLC, it has a different level of endurance and performance.

Whatever those individual chips are, is what the drive is.

In the storage industry, we did things very differently. We looked at the storage medium as media and we developed technology that, for instance, in hard drives there are many heads and disks in a hard drive that make up the storage elements.

In each one of those elements, not only do they have fewer capabilities in the overall drive, but they vary by component. From the storage industry, we said we were going to make a very reliable device out of a bunch of less reliable devices that are low cost, because cost matters. In order for the hard drives to survive all of those years, they had to really focus on how to make them more cost-effective. So it’s a simple concept: use the lowest-cost media to make the product work at a high level. The Guardian technology was really the inspiration behind it. The concept there was to take the lowestcost flash, which was consumergrade MLC, and build an enterprise drive out of it that would operate like the most expensive media SLC. The reviews for the Guardian products that we’ve launched this year have come back and we’re not only as good as SLC, but we’re better than SLC and we’re three times less in Visit www.eeweb.com

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cost. When we first came up with this concept, we thought that we’d be behind or that somebody else would have already come up with it, but we stand here today and we realize that nobody else thought of it.

It’s really given us a huge advantage in the industry and it’s really what’s launching the company.

What are the differences between single-level cell and multi-level cell flash drives?

Single-level cell (SLC) is really where flash got its start. You have an electrical cell that gathers charge and it either represents, based on what the charge is, a ‘1’ or a ‘0’. It’s pretty simple binary unit storage.

What the flash guys realized is that they could get a better cost if they distinguished four different levels, or 2-bits, in that same cell. Early on, Multi-level cell (MLC) was invented

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and used in the consumer industry where reliability wasn’t as important as it was in some of the other applications that flash was used for initially—industrial, medical, defense, etc. Ultimately, enterprise started all as SLC, because again, from a reliability perspective, nobody had the technology to ensure that MLC could actually work in the enterprise. So you could imagine that it is just harder when you have one cell and you have to distinguish four different levels versus one cell distinguishing one or two.

What does endurance mean in the SSD world?

Endurance is actually really interesting in many ways relative to SSDs. The first way it’s interesting is that from a storage perspective, it’s never come up in the equation. We are talking about write endurance, or how

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many times you can write and erase the data from the device. Hard drives don’t have an issue with that, so you can take the cheapest desktop drive and the most expensive enterprise drive, and for the most part you aren’t going to be limited in how many times you are going to be able to read or write. There may be other factors that separate enterprise and desktop from a reliability and performance perspective, but endurance, or “writability,” was never in the equation in hard drives. This is interesting from two perspectives. One, with SSDs, the type of flash has a huge effect on how many times you can read and write it. As you can you imagine, it’s proportional to cost. If you look at a scale from consumer-grade MLC all the way to SLC, you go from the ability to read, write and re-write the flash 3,000 times in consumer-grade MLC to 100,000 times with SLC. That, in fact, is really why to this day, many

INTERVIEW users still use SLC, because they want to be guaranteed that they can write and re-write data on their cells multiple times. The reason why it’s interesting in two ways is that when you are faced with that very discrete differences in the media and how many times they write, and you look at the application usage models for enterprise drives, they require all three.

It’s very difficult for the most sophisticated users of SSD storage, because they have to look at their application and figure out how many times it’s going to be written in a lifetime and decide which type of media to buy, so it adds complexity. What’s even more interesting is, there’s a lot of less-sophisticated users buying SSDs who actually don’t understand really how their devices are being used and are potentially making big mistakes by buying the lowest-cost SSDs and then finding out six months later that it’s worn out. This always happens when there’s a technology transition, because there’s always something about the new technology that’s different and less known and requires some practical field experience to understand.

For us, Guardian technology is all about being able to use the lowestcost media and being able to use that successfully for any workload and through that full range of endurance.

This way, our customers can buy a product and tune it to whatever application they want. It makes it easier for them and also saves them a ton of money because they’re not throwing away a drive that is essentially a nice low-acquisition cost, but absolutely doesn’t last in their applications. We work with our customers as well to help them understand what their application needs and what kind of SSDs they need to use in it. Endurance is really a fundamental difference between hard drive storage and SSD storage.

Everything else looks the same— it’s a square box, it has a capacity on the front cover, it has a performance associated with it, but you really have to pay attention to endurance.

What other applications could MLCs be used for?

Traditionally, consumer-grade MLC is used for consumer products and client products, like laptops and iPads. That’s because consumers read their data more than they write to it. If you think about an enterprise application, online transaction processing, it has completely random workloads coming in. If you are processing data from an ATM, you’re writing and reading over and over and it’s very different from the consumer side. That’s how the market has been segmented—if you have a consumergrade product, it doesn’t do much writing, so you use consumer-grade MLC. There is an enterprise-grade MLC that has been offered over the past few years that increases the endurance 10 times, but also increases the price. That is what’s been used for most of the mainstream mixed workload type of enterprise applications. SLC, which has the highest endurance, tends to be used for more stringent applications. The problem with that is that, every time you go up in endurance and you go up significantly in price. eMLC is about 40 to 50% more costly than consumergrade MLC and SLC is about 200 to 300% more expensive than MLC. Customers, again, are forced to deal with this difficult trade-off of do I get the more expensive SSD that might make my system too costly, but it’ll work, or do I get the less-expensive SSD that’ll be the right price point, but will cause problems in the field or cause problems from a total cost of ownership perspective. Again, what we’ve focused on is solving that problem by building everything we

do out of the lowest-cost media, but actually developing the technology that makes the MLC more like SLC. What is the process of increasing endurance?

There are multiple ways of looking at it, but I think the best way to look at it is that some architectures out there accept the fact that the flash is a certain level of capability. What they do is, they spread the writes around as much as possible to keep that even, they’ll keep track of how many times the flash is being written so that they don’t overwrite and ruin a cell and they’ll use a very powerful error-correction code so that when the cell starts to wear out, they’ll get the data back. The problem with that is, you really don’t get far beyond what the actual capability of the flash is. Secondly, as the devices wear and you have to use that sophisticated error-correction more and more often, the performance of the product tends to degrade.

So our approach has been different from the beginning.

Our approach is to go in and manage the physics of the flash and manage the total sea of flash that’s on the drive as a unified system so that we’re actually making the flash last longer. By making it last longer, we keep consistent performance because we are not counting on heavy doses of error-correction to fix it and we’re tailoring the flash to the application that’s being used. The other most important concept to think about is that flash is really complex when it comes to managing the physics of flash.

There are many different knobs that are in a flash that represent the reading and writing process and how those physical electrons are understood. For the product that is the flash chip, the vendors have to Visit www.eeweb.com

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EEWeb PULSE set all of those parameters in the factory one time, and there are some very significant trade-offs in flash relative to how you want to operate it in the beginning of life to the end of life. For instance, in the beginning of life, you don’t have to write it as hard to get the data back, so that means you can last longer and you aren’t wearing it out as fast. The problem is, at the end of life, you have to write it hard enough so that you can get the data back. For all of the people who have flash and pictures on your flash cards—it lasts one year in the consumer market. If you put your flash away for two years, you aren’t guaranteed to get your pictures back. Flash vendors have to make a trade-off between retention and how long that data lasts at the end of life and how hard they write it at the beginning of life. They have one time to do that and as you can imagine, that’s a pretty significant trade-off. With our technology, we optimize the flash continuously, on a microsecond basis, so that every microsecond for five years, we’re changing how that flash is tuned to optimize it to the moment in time that we’re in. So you’re talking about taking five years and dividing that by a microsecond versus one.

So the flash guys tune it once, we tune it a billion times. That creates a huge potential to get the most out

of flash. For our products, we build it at a consumer-grade MLC, which is 3,000 write cycles. Our drives can be used at 40,000 write cycles, which is a 14x enhancement over the base. We expect that enhancement to grow over the next several years as the flash nodes shrink down and the capabilities of those nodes will increase the Guardian effect to 14x to 20x to 30x to 40x. To someone who is using the drive, it doesn’t matter if every flash cell or flash chip on the board does 40,000 cycles, the only thing that matters to the user is that the drive does 40,000 cycles. That’s the system approach that Guardian has taken.

compete with flash guys. We don’t need to have the super expensive, super marked-up flash that our competitors use to compete with the flash vendors—we use the lowestcost media. It may only be a couple cents difference, but the value of the product is so much greater that we compete very well. We have the advantage as a company of not having to own a fab, which is a significant investment, and we have the advantage, of course, of making sure they’re always aligned with the top vendors. We feel very comfortable that we will continue to carve out a very significant role in the enterprise storage market over the next several years.

Where do you see SMART Storage Systems heading in the next couple of years?

I think that we’ve established ourselves as a key enterprise SSD supplier. That’s not an easy thing to do because there are probably about seven or eight true enterpriseclass suppliers. There are also about 139 SSD suppliers out there as well. You’re not going to have a seat at the table unless you have technology that allows you to deliver the performance, the reliability and the endurance at the best cost.

Because our technology allows us to use the lowest-cost media, we can

For more information about SMART Storage Systems, visit:

www.smartstoragesys.com

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INTERVIEW

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FEATURED PRODUCTS Capacitive Coupling for Human Body Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, today announced from the Embedded World conference in Germany its BodyCom™ technology, which provides designers with the world’s first framework for using the human body as a secure communication channel. Compared to existing wireless methods, BodyCom technology provides lower energy consumption, while further increasing security via bidirectional authentication. BodyCom technology is activated by capacitively coupling to the human body. For more information, please click here.

First USB 3.0 PC Oscilloscope Saelig Company, Inc. has introduced the PicoScope 3207A and PicoScope 3207B, the first PC oscilloscopes to offer a USB 3.0 interface.

The PicoScope 3207A is a 2-channel USB oscilloscope with 250 MHz bandwidth, 1 GS/s sampling rate, 256 Msample buffer memory and a built-in function generator. Features include digital triggering for accurate, stable waveform display, and equivalent-time sampling which boosts the effective sampling rate to 10 GSa/s for repetitive signals. The PicoScope 3207B has 512 Msample buffer memory and an additional 32ksample arbitrary waveform generator with 100 MSa/s update rate.

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MCU Enables Automotive Safety Compliance STMicroelectronics announced a new member in its multi-core microcontroller (MCU) family aimed at functional safety applications for car electronics. The new device combines compliance with the most stringent automotive safety standards (ISO 26262) and increased non-volatile memory size, giving a simple upward migration path from existing parts and strengthening ST’s product line of fault-tolerant microcontrollers for mission-critical automotive applications. The ISO 26262 functional safety standard defines the rules needed in order to avoid unreasonable risk due to hazards caused by malfunctioning of the complete electrical system. For more information, please click here.

High Capability Wirewound Safety Resistor Vishay Intertechnology, Inc. introduced a new axial cemented wirewound safety resistor specially designed to ensure safe and silent fusing operation during overload conditions in electric appliances, energy meters, and power supplies. Featuring a fusing time of < 30 s for a 45 W overload and high surge voltage capability, the new Vishay Draloric AC03..CS offers a special cement coating for immediate interruption without flame and explosion when mains voltage (220 Vrms) is applied.

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Flash Endu Enhanceme Technologi Driving the Shift to SSD Driven Data Centers

John Scaramuzzo

President at SMART Storage Systems

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he data center has always been an environment of significant change, however no more so than over the last five years. New storage technologies, like cloud computing and virtualization, and increasing demands have put data center managers “in between a rock and a hard place” when it comes to identifying new storage solutions.

To address these challenges, data center managers must seek out solutions that can simultaneously meet their performance and reliability requirements without breaking the bank. This new data center reality is driving a shift in storage technology from traditional spinning media, like hard-disk drives (HDDs), to Flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs). However, to date cost has remained a barrier to widespread SSD adoption. Let’s take a look at why the industry is looking to SSDs to solve these new data center challenges, and what manufacturers are doing to make Flash more accessible and cost-effective.

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urance ent ies

TECH ARTICLE

SMART

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S Y S T E M S

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EEWeb PULSE Sizing the Data Center Challenge Analyst firm IDC predicts that the volume of digital content will reach 8 Zettabytes (ZB) by 20151, up from 2.7 ZB in 2012, while IEEE projects that data traffic will grow ten-fold from 2010 to 2015 and up to 100-fold by 20202. Causing this growth in data is the transition to real-time interaction at home and in the office – from emails and social media “likes,” to video, photo and document uploads for sharing. In fact, it is estimated that 247 billion emails are sent each day, 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every day, and more than 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second. These clearly are some of the greatest contributors to the data growth explosion, but there are millions of other sources doing their part, as well.

Ultimately, this all leads to one astounding stat: 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years, and the pace is speeding up.

Enterprise Storage – The HDD Dilemma As datasets continue to grow, data centers are forced to scale their physical infrastructure to reach the necessary level of aggregated throughput required to both manipulate the data, and make it available in the realtime fashion to which we have all become accustomed.

Due to HDDs limited throughput capabilities, data center managers often must purchase hundreds or even thousands of drives and use common performance enhancing techniques, such as “short stroking,” to have a noticeable impact, or deal with the very high latency associated with magnetic rotating media. Performance enhancing techniques like short stroking restrict the placement of data on HDDs to a limited number of cylinders, limiting the usable capacity of the drive to between 10 – 20 percent of its rated capacity. This, in turn, leads to the need to purchase more drives, quickly escalating not only the drive acquisition cost, but also the costs associated with larger and larger data centers, and increased power consumption and cooling cost.

The question then becomes, do you address future throughput needs with more HDDs, or look to other technologies for help?

The Next Frontier – SSDs in the Enterprise SSDs emerged on the market as the answer to the HDD dilemma because of their significant performance IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020; Dec. 2011 IEEE Industry Connections Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment; July 2012 1 2

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improvement. However, the development of previous generations of SSDs involved complex, mutually exclusive tradeoffs among several key attributes such as performance, price, endurance and reliability. For example, designers had to choose between singlelevel cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash technologies. While MLC flash is the best replacement for HDDs from a cost perspective, it has inherently lower write endurance and is less reliable than its SLC counterpart, two characteristics that are extremely important in enterprise environments.

These inherent limitations of MLC Flash limited the use of early MLC-based storage devices to applications such as media players, phones, cameras, and PCs, because lost information on consumer devices is considered more of an annoyance than a critical problem. This has been complicated even further as NAND Flash manufacturers reduce the die size of their chips to achieve higher densities and lower costs. Flash can store more and gets cheaper with shrinking geometries, but the error rate increases, making it more difficult to integrate into products serving enterprise applications. Through a variety of methods including wear leveling, error correction, and sparing (aka over provisioning), SSD manufacturers were able to increase the reliability, data integrity and endurance of their drives. This has led to SSDs being deployed in enterprise environments, creating the situation today where SSDs are now looked to by many as the only answer to the storage bottlenecks that exist in the new data center.

Techno like the G Technolog represent a improve Flash man technology MLC Flash SLC endura at a fracti cost, and any perfo degrad

However, there were still numerous roadblocks to mass

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adoption. While SLC-based SSDs were being used in the enterprise, their high price limited them to niche roles such as a cache front-end to HDD storage for ‘hot data’ (such as database indexes) and very high performance applications where a more cost-effective solution was simply not available. Lower cost MLC-based SSDs found their place in the enterprise as boot drives and in readintensive applications, such as web and file servers. The disparity between the inherent capabilities and cost of SLC and MLC Flash, created a large chasm between these two segments of applications where SSDs just didn’t fit. This led SSD manufacturers to focus on striking the balance between SLC-like endurance, and MLC-pricing, in order to make SSDs more accessible to a larger part of enterprise applications.

ologies Guardian gy Platform a quantum ement in nagement y, enabling h to reach ance levels, ion of the d without ormance dation.

An Evolution in Flash Management

Over the last couple of years, new technologies, such as SMART Storage Systems’ Guardian Technology Platform, have come to market to strike the balance between the reliability, endurance and cost of SLC and MLC Flash. Technologies like the Guardian Technology Platform represent a quantum improvement in Flash management technology, enabling MLC Flash to reach SLC endurance levels, at a fraction of the cost, and without any performance degradation. Now, enterprise organizations and Tier-1 OEMs can deploy enterprise-class SSDs based on MLC Flash, that are equipped with a complete suite of enterprise features, for a cost per Gigabyte less than half that of SLC-based drives.

TECH ARTICLE

leverages two revolutionary technology developments known as Aggregated Flash Management and Advanced Signal Processing to extend Flash’s inherent endurance capabilities. These two technologies go beyond traditional wear-leveling or error correction methods, managing the Flash at the system level to ensure each Flash element is maximized to its individual endurance capabilities, creating a drive that far outreaches the rating of any single component. The recent advancements in SSD controller technology is complemented by a deeper understanding of the true capabilities of consumer-grade MLC Flash, enabling SSD manufacturers to drive even greater endurance from the lowest cost Flash. This combination results in storage solutions that provide the performance, endurance and reliablity required for today’s enterprise applications, at prices that are trending closer to traditional HDDs.

The Result – The Shift to an SSD-Driven Data Center It is clear that the use of SSDs in the enterprise market has come a long way since they were introduced as HDD replacements in 2008. Significant improvements in performance and reliability have contributed to wider enterprise adoption, but adoption is accelerating because of the of SSD manufacturers’ ability to drive additional endurance from more cost-effective Flash, driving TCO down to acceptable enterprise levels.

With technologies like SMART Storage Systems’ Guardian Technology Platform now available on SSDs in the market, the barriers to mass adoption are crumbling. The Guardian Technology Platform, and other approaches like it, allow for the lowest cost Flash to be used in mixed-workload and writeintensive applications common in the enterprise. This is changing the game in enterprise storage, allowing organizations to tackle their new data center challenges with SSDs that not only meet their performance and reliability requirements, but that provide the necessary endurance to withstand the write-intensive nature of enterprise applications.

So how is this done? There are many different approaches for extending endurance within the industry, however the Guardian Technology Platform Visit www.eeweb.com

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TECH ARTICLE

Paul Clarke Electronics Design Engineer

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) look like very complex integrated circuits. Performing bespoke functions and having engineers programming them in strange languages puts many people off. This is often understandable, as datasheets are often little help as starting points, and forums are full of experts who talk from years of experience -- all of that can be very baffling.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a different type of FPGA programmer, however. Although I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t program FPGAs professionally, I do have a passion for them. I come from years of embedded electronics and programming in Assembler and C on microcontrollers, and so for me, moving to FPGAs was at first confusing. I soon found, however, that many of my skills crossed over. FPGAs are in fact quite elegant in design and flexibility. But to program one you must first learn a new language, VHDL. Visit www.eeweb.com

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FPGAs have been around some time now, going back into the 80s when the first programmable devices were born. Those first devices were quite simple compared to those of today. Back then it was common to see board of logic ICs that then became racks of boards, and even cabinets filled with boards, to perform some task. If you were around in those days then (like me) you would have been using EPROMs, GALs, and even PALs to perform more condensed logic functions.

These devices have all contributed to what we now see inside a FPGAs and how they work. However, the true functionality of the internals is where people get scared away by the complexity of FPGAs. The truth is, though, at the beginning you don’t really need to know how it works inside; you can learn as you move along.

So what is VHDL then? VHDL stands for “Very-highspeed-integrated-circuits Hardware Description Language,” and it is one of a few languages that allows a programmer to “describe” how the internals of a chip will work. C programmers generate lists of step-by-step instructions that a microcontroller follows and executes one at a time, step by step. Hardware, however, is not quite like that. Hardware is alive and functioning all at the same time. For instance, it’s not hard to see that when you are sitting in front of your computer many things are happening at once. The screen is displaying this article, and the keyboard, cooling fans, disk drives, etc, are all running their own little functions simultaneously. They are all running independently from the main processor.

In fact, the main processor is only handing out orders and requests to the devices. FPGAs are like your computer in that many “circuits” are all running at once and can all operate separately (as well as combined) for a greater function. It’s therefore very important to understand how programming hardware is different than programming in C: it’s all happening at once!

This somewhat scary idea can make programming a FPGA seem very odd -- how do you control all these systems at once? Well, it’s no different than having a board full of different devices on a PCB, except for now it’s all inside one chip. And the fun bit is, there’s no soldering needed, and you don’t need to wait for ICs to come in the post. You can rip it all up and design almost whatever you like.

FPGAs are no longer for the rich. In the past, development boards would cost thousands of dollars to buy. Even programming cables were expensive, yet another reason to keep hobbyists out. Now, however, hobbyists and professional engineers alike can access good quality and low cost tools. Along with the rising

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availability and popularity of low cost kits like the Arduino and mbed microcontroller boards, we are now seeing a range of FPGA boards. These include boards like the Papilio [papilio.cc], the Drigmorn from Enterpoint [www.enterpoint.co.uk] and the XuLA from Xess [www.xess.com]. If you look at any of these boards you will also notice a common element - The Xilinx Spartan FPGA. Just like there are many programming languages, there are also lots of different manufactures of FPGAs, and

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TECH ARTICLE

In the past, development boards would cost thousands of dollars to buy.

Now, however, hobbyists and professional engineers alike can access good quality and low cost tools. as important a choice as the devices you use. A good tool chain can make programming easier to work on -to the point that it almost becomes enjoyable.

It’s for these reasons above that all my following articles will follow the Xilinx tool chain. I’ll be using and talking at times about the different development boards -- the Papilio, XuLA, and Drigmon. However, you should not feel that you also have to do so. VHDL is a cross device and manufacturing language that you will be able to use anywhere.

About the Author

each has a range of devices they offer. The Spartan, however, has become the bread and butter of hobbyists and the above development boards. This is not to discount Altrea, however, who offers very good devices for the price, but many have become Xilinx followers.

The Xilinx tool chain is one of the nicest and easy to get to grips with its IDEs. It is hard to -disqualify others, but there is just something about the easy-to-use interface and simulation tools that makes people who use it forget that it is there. I have always said that a tool chain is just

Paul Clarke is a Digital Electronics Engineer with strong software skills in assembly and C for embedded systems. At ebm-papst he develops embedded electronics for thermal management control solutions for the air movement industry. These controllers monitor environmental inputs like Temperature, Humidity and Pressure and then control the speed of our fans based on various profiles. Their controls also interface with other systems over RS232/485 or TCP/IP as well as a host of other user or control interfaces.

A full list of his job roles can be found on LinkedIn – http://uk.linkedin.com/in/pauljclarke

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SPECIAL FEATURE Karen Kohtz

Assistant Editor, EEWeb

Tindie:

Maker Marketplace

ile Petrone saw a need for Etsy-like makerspace, and so ounded Tindie.com Visit www.eeweb.com

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Many people have been fascinated by recent developments in electronics and engineering, such as 3D printing and the Arduino microcontroller. Emile Petrone, a selftaught engineer and founder of Tindie.com, was one of those fascinated by the new advancements. He wanted to learn about electronics and build his own projects, but didn’t know where to begin.

So began the road towards Tindie, a market for hardware hobbyists, tinkerers, and beginners, not to mention engineers with years of weekend projects to share. Before Tindie “there were a lot of people out there who were creating interesting projects,” says Petrone, “But I didn’t know where to find them or where to purchase those projects. Making Tindie was basically a way to fill my need to find stuff to build – that’s why it’s here.”

Much like the site Etsy.com, which hosts sellers who make crafts by hand with buyers from around the world, Tindie is a place where hardware and technology enthusiasts who make their own designs, hardware, and technological projects, can sell them to others.

back in April, however, he wasn’t even sure if his idea for a hardware marketplace was viable. The response to his post was positive and supportive, however, and he quickly realized that an online hardware marketplace would receive a warm welcome.

So far, the site has certainly been successful, recently receiving a seed round of funding of $500,000 from investors. “ We’ve been growing,” Petrone says, “The website has been successful enough to start building a company and a team around it.”

Hiring new people is always a good sign, and Tindie seems poised to sustain growth. One of the reasons for this is perhaps the beginners who buy from the site. Petrone points out that beginners are a key group. They buy kits from sellers on the site that help them learn to solder a robot, or build a xylophone. “These [projects] don’t really take much skill,” says Petrone, but they do get beginners “building stuff on their own.” Petrone seems hopeful that, as they learn, beginners will graduate from buying kits to purchasing more advanced stuff – different pieces for their own bigger projects and bigger visions.

“Tindie can go into the niches of electronics and hardware that the bigger companies just can’t afford to go into...You never know what’s going to pop up on the site any day.”

Sellers are people with electronic or engineering backgrounds who have been making stuff in their garages for years, according to Petrone. Sellers are “people [who] have been doing this on the side for years as something they love, and now on Tindie they have an avenue to give it to the wider world.” He goes on to point out that Tindie allows people who’ve given a lot to the community (like those who post source code and information about their designs and projects freely) to get a little back. “The website gives people who are making open source hardware an outlet to make a living off what they produce,” he says. It’s clear that some sellers are definitely “getting a little back,” making hundreds of dollars, even thousands of dollars, a month selling their creations.

With sellers doing so well, it’s hard to believe that it’s been less than a year since Petrone started the site.

When he first had the idea and posted about it on Reddit

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Another reason the site seems positioned to do well is its corner on niche markets. According to Petrone, “Tindie can go into the niches of electronics and hardware that the bigger companies just can’t afford to go into. To make money on a product they (bigger companies) need to make a hundred or a thousand of that product, but (on Tindie) everyone on the site is going into these niches. You never know what’s going to pop up on the site any day.” A single seller can build a customized robot, for instance, that performs a certain task, or a seller can design a custom synthesizer that makes a unique sound. This customization could be very valuable to some, such as DJs or electronic musicians who want a unique sound.

Along with unveiling the $500,000 seed fund, Tindie also unveiled a new fundraising tool that will hopefully allow sellers to take less risk with their custom products. The tool allows sellers to list a product they’ve designed or

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(Above) Tindie’s fundraising tool allows sellers to share their custom creations without the risk. For more, click here.

built themselves, while setting a minimum order on it.

People who are interested can then pre-order the device and demonstrate a demand. Once enough demand is demonstrated, sellers are able to order all the parts and inventory required to make the product, hopefully with less risk.

Emile Petrone set out to learn to make cool projects, and he’s well on his way to helping others do the same. When asked about his favorite products, he immediately mentions mentions the Sedwick 3d Printer, the Hexy Robot, and Gamby, an Arduino Retro Gaming Shield, as well as Jason Huggin’s robot that plays Angry Birds.. As the robot took the internet by storm, he says, “it was pretty crazy to see it sell and see how well it’s doing.” Now, a new model of the robot is in the works, one that will have the ability to connect to Selenium, a Python test framework (also created by Huggins). The new model has the ability to connect to a Python test framework, Selenium, which was also created by Huggins. The connection to

Selenium allows the robot to run “test sweeps” on mobile apps, and is geared towards mobile developers and small businesses.

The Angry Birds Robot and other unique products available at the online marketplace, may very well put Tindie on the map as the place to visit for innovate design solutions…. as well as cool toys.

See for yourself:

www.tindie.com

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Overview of the

TI DRV8301 RM48 Motor Kit Chris Anderson EMC Engineer Lab Manager

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EEWeb Tech Lab

The TI DRV8301 RM48 Kit is centered around TI’s DRV8301 Driver and the Hercules ARM MCUs, and targeted for automotive applications.

Setup Once you have all your hardware, TI has a very specific set of directions to follow for set-up. The first thing you should do is verify that Jumper II is in place. After that you’ll want to hook up the motor.

Hooking up the Motor The first thing you need to do to hook up the motor is hook up the wiring harness. The motor needs to be plugged in (if you’re looking from top-to-bottom on your board) with the sequence black, red, white, green.

Feedback Sensors Once you have your motor hooked up you’ll need to hook up the two feedback sensors. The one labeled J4 goes on J4, the encoder feedback. The one labeled J10, the hall-effect sensor, goes on J10.

After the motor is hooked up, hook up the USB to the computer. Last, hook up the DC supply. To protect your device though, make sure that you have your DC side plugged in before you plug the AC in.

Once you’re all loaded up you can see the different knobs that you have that will set things such as the velocity of the motor. Depending on the different modes you have it in, it may not actually be setting the velocity but the rate of rotation. You can also enable or disable the motor and set the different control modes. There are status LEDs, and some different graphs depending on the mode that you’re in.

To start, just get the motor going. Notice that you’re spinning at 93 RPM. Crank that up to 3700, and then to as fast as it will let you. You’ll see that the highest is about 4200 RPM. If you want to see what’s going on in the motor, you can turn on your different graphs which will give you different feedback on voltage, current, or anything you want to look at. You can change the scale of the graph to get more resolution.

PRODUCT OVERVIEW Demo Code If the demo code provided is a good starting point for what you want to do, what you can do is load the same demo code into the Code Composer Studio. To do that, open up Code Composer Studio and select “Project,” an import Existing CCS Eclipse Project. To do that what you need to do, go to the directory where the project is located. It will be on the TI directory on your C Drive, and simply navigate down to where it’s actually located. Then hit “Refresh,” and you’ll see RN48 Instant Spin BLCD pop up. Hit “Finish” and the project will begin importing into your “Projects” folder. If you open up the project folder, you’ll see your main function.

Let’s say you want to hook up some additional circuitry to the board, maybe through the 5V and some of the other connectors. You could put code in here to handle that functionality. If you need to initialize some additional circuitry prior to running your motor or need to have some additional circuitry running while your motor is running, you could get that code inter-spliced in here.

If you need any other functions, maybe monitoring the motor or working in conjunction with the motor, you can dig into the source code and figure out where you need to put those functions.

Conclusion Though the kit did have some software issues, the hardware is very robust and if you’re in the automotive industry, it should cover just about any need you may have. If you’re a hobbyist, it should cover way more than you need. If you’re in any other 3-Phase motor design application, it should cover just about all your needs as well.

To watch this review and others from EEWeb Tech Lab:

Software It seems to be a pretty decent software package. It can give you a lot of information about what’s going on with the motor. It’s a good starting point. To that end, you can actually load the demo code into the code composer studio.

Click Here Visit www.eeweb.com

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