Toshiba advances next generation ADAS that uses Cypress Semper fail-safe storage

Cypress Semiconductor announced Wednesday that Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation has selected Cypress’ Semper NOR Flash for its next-generation Visconti line of automotive Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). 

Architected with an embedded Arm Cortex-M0 processing core, the Semper family is purpose-built for demanding automotive environments where high-density and functional safety compliance are required. The Toshiba Visconti ADAS SoC is specifically targeted for key automobile makers working toward Autonomous Driving level 2.

The Cypress Semper NOR Flash family leads the industry in Functional Safety compliance and was the first flash to be designed specifically to meet the ISO26262 automotive functional safety standard, reaching ASIL-B compliancy. 

Semper NOR Flash also supports automotive temperatures up to +125°C (AEC-Q100 Grade 1) and meets the density and performance requirements for storage in ADAS applications through Autonomous Driving level 5.

“For the Toshiba Visconti5 ADAS SoC, it is critical that the integrated components selected for the design are field-proven, built to the highest standards of safety and reliability, and will have the endurance required for advanced ADAS applications,” said Takeshi Sugahara, Technology Executive of Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation. “Cypress’ fail-safe storage solutions are a key to enable our Visconti5 platform to exceed our customers’ expectations and requirements for next-generation automotive designs.”

“Cypress is proud of its success in providing the world’s most advanced and reliable fail-safe storage products with integrated compute core and functional safety for automotive applications,” said Amr El-Ashmawi, vice president of marketing, Memory Products Division at Cypress. “As the world’s number one market share provider of automotive-grade flash, we look forward to continuing our collaborative work with Toshiba for delivering next-generation ADAS systems in this growing segment of the automotive market.”

KIOXIA’s KumoScale software now put on UNH-IOL NVMe-oF integrator’s list

KIOXIA America (formerly Toshiba Memory America), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced this week that its KumoScale storage software with NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) v3.11 has been added to The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory’s (UNH-IOL) official Integrator’s List. 

In order to be considered for inclusion on the list, technologies must undergo conformance testing performed by the UNH-IOL through laboratory tests or during an NVMe plugfest. Successful completion of this testing provides a level of assurance that the product being tested will function properly in NVMe-oF environments.

Developed with a strong focus on virtualizing, managing and securing data, the KumoScale software suite provides a feature-rich storage abstraction for containers and virtual machines. It delivers secure flash access, API access to orchestration frameworks, among other capabilities, and takes advantage of the unique performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs. 

KumoScale software was the first storage software technology to be granted NVMe-oF certification by the UNH-IOL, and KIOXIA America continues to submit new releases of the software suite for certification. 

“Ensuring the interoperability of technologies with the NVMe standards is at the heart of what we do,” noted David Woolf, senior engineer, Datacenter Technologies, UNH-IOL. “KumoScale block storage software was the first of its kind to be listed on the NVMe-oF Integrator’s List back in 2017. We commend KIOXIA for their continued software innovations and for making NVMe-oF more deployable in cloud data centers.”

Toshiba brings in DT02-V surveillance HDD lineup with high areal density and improves reliability

Toshiba America Electronic Components (Toshiba) announces the DT02-V Series of surveillance HDDs, its product lineup created for digital video recorder (DVR) and network video recorder (NVR) platforms.

The series utilizes latest magnetic recording technologies to achieve high areal density, helping to improve reliability compared to the prior MD04ABA-V Series. With up to 6TB capacity, the new DT02-V Series supports a maximum of 32 high-resolution camera streams and is ideal for use in surveillance DVR and NVR platforms with as many as eight drive bays.

The DT02-V Series is designed for robust 24/7 operation at HDD temperatures as high as 40ᵒC for 600,000 load/unload cycles, at rated workload of 180TB a year. Other features include a SATA 6Gbit/s interface with a 128MiB cache to help minimizing frame drops, and a robust mechanical platform designed to achieve a 1 million-hour MTTF.

“Our latest surveillance HDD family, the DT02-V Series, delivers up to 6TB of storage capacity, and is designed for use with leading surveillance DVR and NVR platforms,” says Shuji Takaoka, general manager of storage products sales and marketing division at Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage. “It also provides a variety of capacity options while improving reliability for high resolution surveillance video streams.”

The DT02-V Series 4TB samples are currently available, 6TB samples will be planned from January, and a 2TB sample is expected to be available in March.

Toshiba expands e-STUDIO MFP line with A3 models, ideal for small-to-medium businesses

Toshiba America Business Solutions expanded its e-STUDIO multifunction printer (MFP) line with the introduction of five ledger-size (A3) models addressing the document management needs of small-to-medium-size businesses (SMBs).

Toshiba’s monochrome product family (the e-STUDIO2822AM, e-STUDIO2822AF, e-STUDIO2823AM, e-STUDIO2329A and e-STUDIO2829A) offers several models with the print, copy, scan and fax functionality small workgroups need.

Delivering documents at up-to 28 pages-per-minute (ppm) in razor-sharp 2400 x 600 dots-per-inch resolution, these products also scan color documents at up to 22 ppm presenting vibrant digital materials at a moment’s notice.

Busy environments with space constraints such as logistics, manufacturing and retail that demand all the functionality of a full-sized MFP, including A3 support, will appreciate the compact letter-size (A4) footprint of the e-STUDIO2822AM or fax-enabled e-STUDIO2822AF. The systems conveniently provide ledger-size support via the 50-sheet built-in bypass for jobs requiring larger media.

Users may customize these models even further by adding the Wi-Fi option that turns the networked MFPs into an access point. When coupled with the new e-BRIDGE Print & Capture Entry app, Apple iOS and Android users may print-to and scan-from Toshiba MFPs to their mobile devices.

Toshiba introduces its initial electronic fuse, eFuse, which can be used time and again

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage launched the “TCKE8xx series,” its initial eFuse ICs, a lineup of six products that support various functions needed for circuit protection in power supply lines. Shipments of two products in the lineup start Tuesday.

The most remarkable feature of the eFuse ICs is that they can be used repeatedly. Conventional physical fuses—glass tube fuses and chip fuses—protect power line circuits by physically shutting them down when they are in an over-current state, and are needed to be replaced once broken. eFuse IC products use their own circuitry to shut power lines down when an abnormality occurs, and can be reset and reused.

Another advantage is that eFuse ICs eliminate complex circuit design and a number of components, realizing much simpler circuit designs with fewer components and a smaller area than a protection function secured with discrete parts.

The new TCKE8xx Series realizes highly robust circuit protection by raising over-current detection accuracy to a level beyond that of physical fuses. 

Since the eFuse ICs also have current clamp and voltage clamp to protect against over-current and over-voltage, they can protect circuits and maintain power supply by clamping voltage and current at specified values, even when excess over-current or over-voltage is applied. Their over-temperature and short-circuit protection functions protect circuits by instantly shutting off in the event of extreme overheating, or unexpected short circuiting.

The combination of these characteristics allow the products to help protect electronic equipment such as servers and laptop PCs, which have been required to handle increasingly higher withstand voltages and currents in recent years. As Toshiba intends to obtain IEC 62368-1 certification, the international safety standard for high level safety, they will also simplify the certification tests customers’ devices are required to undergo.

KIOXIA’s PCIe 4.0 enterprise NVMe SSDs strengthens storage performance; achieves PCI-SIG compliance and NVMe certification

KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced Wednesday that its lineup of PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) has achieved PCI-SIG compliance for PCIe 4.0 and University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) certification. 

KIOXIA’s CM6 Series passed interoperability tests at the August 2019 PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop – that includes official PCIe 4.0 specification tests. KIOXIA America will be on hand at Supercomputing 2019 later this month to showcase new levels of flash performance enabled by its CM6 Series SSDs. 

KIOXIA develops PCIe 4.0 NVM Express SSDs and continues to push the limits of flash storage performance. The CM6 Series brings planned performance improvements of three times over its PCIe 3.0 predecessors and is 12 times faster than SATA drives. KIOXIA’s lineup of Gen4 PCIe SSDs also includes the CD6 Series, which is targeted to cloud and scale-out environments.

The PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise SSDs utilizes KIOXIA’s 96-layer BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, PCIe 2x2 or 1x4 lane configuration options, targeted transfer rates up to 6,900 megabytes per second; and supports SFF-TA-1001 (also known as U.3) operation with universal backplanes for simplified customer use with SAS, SATA and NVMe SSDs.

KIOXIA was at Microsoft Ignite earlier this month to demonstrate the CM6 Series running in a Microsoft Azure hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform with Quanta Cloud Technologies – and enabling twice performance gains over a PCIe 3.0 solution. 

“We were able to show that our CM6 Series SSDs are capable of pushing SSD sequential read performance to over 55 gigabytes per second (GB/s) across eight drives – nearly 7GB/s per SSD – and we’re not done yet. KIOXIA will continue to push the performance envelope for our customers,” noted Alvaro Toledo, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning for KIOXIA America.

PCI-SIG hosts Compliance Workshops several times a year in various locations worldwide, giving members the opportunity to test and validate their products before entering the field. Compliance testing is completed against both PCI-SIG maintained systems and other manufacturers of PCI products. 

As the key testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software, the UNH-IOL provides conformance and interoperability testing across various operating systems, drivers, and hardware platforms, as well as PCIe SSDs and PCIe-enabled servers. “The SSD market is quickly moving to NVM Express technology, and standards compliance is critical to ensure smooth adoption,” added Toledo.

Toshiba launches three-phase brushless motor control pre-driver IC ideal for high-velocity server fans, blowers and pumps

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation announced on Monday TC78B027FTG, a three-phase brushless motor control pre-driver IC with Intelligent Phase Control (InPAC) technology that enables optimum operating efficiency in applications such as high-velocity server fans, blowers and pumps.

In recent years, advances in server capacity and performance require larger and higher velocity fans for cooling the excess heat generated by the equipment. 

Similarly, small blowers, vacuums and pumps also operate with high-speed impellers that require high power capability. TC78B027FTG is a brushless motor controller with pre-driver that can drive a wide range of external MOSFETs to meet such challenges.

TC78B027FTG features Intelligent Phase Control (InPAC) and Closed Loop Speed Control technologies. InPAC offers high-efficiency drive by synchronizing the phases of the driving voltage and current, thereby delivering maximum real power to the loads. This operation is usually not possible without some kind of compensation, which generally requires significant motor characterizations upfront and operation adjustments in real time to achieve the optimum efficiency throughout the speed range. 

InPAC, on the other hand, is an automatic function that requires initialization during design and therefore minimizes adjustment burdens and speeds up the development time.

A closed loop speed control function regulates and maintains the motor rotational speed under dynamic power fluctuations and load variations, a valuable feature for mission-critical applications such as server fans and other cooling applications. 

Precise setting of a speed profile is done by the built-in non-volatile memory (NVM) and TC78B027FTG therefore eliminates the need for an external MCU for a closed loop speed control.