Over the three days of the Flash Memory Summit Expo, the crowds at the show looked a bit larger than last year. There was plenty of interesting and innovative technology on the Expo Floor including - Flash in HDD, Client and Enterprise level SDDs, and even NVDIMM’s.

Seagate won the “Best of Show” award with their amazing 60TB SSD - talk about packing it in!

I was also surprised to meet an IT Director that is running an All-Flash Data Center! I thought that the cost of flash memory was still too high for this technology, but he showed me that the reduced maintenance costs make it affordable with a payback in about three years. So I would expect to see many more conversions ramping up.

And the technology that is driving the fastest storage is NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express) - making huge advances in capacity and bandwidth.  So where does Total Phase fit in?

The NVMe controllers use an SMBus/I2C sideband for the Management Interface. This is perfect for our Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter and Promira Serial Platform, which can be used during design, bring-up, and testing this Management Interface. Our Beagle I2C/SPI Protocol Analyzer is  perfect for monitoring this SMBus/I2C traffic and quickly analyzing exactly how the communication is working. A few of our customers stopped by to share stories of how they are using Total Phase products during the development of their NVMe products.

Also notable was Viking Technology showing off their eUSB module (Embedded USB) which uses a USB 2.0 interface. We had customers asking how they could sniff the traffic on the eUSB bus, since it does not have a standard Type-A connector, but mounts to a PCB (printed circuit board) instead. The solution is found in our Knowledge Base article - “Monitoring an Embedded USB with a Beagle USB Protocol Analyzer”. The article is available on our website and shows how to correctly tap into the bus with our Beagle USB 480 Protocol Analyzer without disturbing the signal.

Also at the Expo we provide demos of our Beagle USB 5000 v2 SuperSpeed Protocol Analyzer and USB Type-C Power Delivery Analyzer. These are two extremely helpful tools when developing and debugging USB devices and hosts.

And of course we were able to demo our Promira Serial Platform with SPI Active - Level 3 Application showing how we can program Serial NOR Flash memory in Quad IO mode up to a blazing 80 MHz. This is using our Flash Center Software which now supports over 500 memory parts from various vendors including recently added support for additional ISSI parts.

All in all it was a fun show and we are looking forward to attending again next year!

Got any questions about Total Phase products? Send us a note at sales@totalphase.com.