Andes Technology and Phison Electronics Corp. announces that the AndesCore™ N25F Processor has been adopted by Phison's award-winning PCIe Gen4x4 SSD Controller X1 (PS5020-E20) for the enterprise SSD market. The fast and compact N25F provides good balance between performance, area and power, which has made it widely adopted in SoCs demanding performance-efficient embedded controllers.

The AndesCore™ N25F is a 32-bit CPU IP core based on the AndeStar™ V5 architecture, which extends but is compatible to the RISC-V architecture. With an optimized 5-stage pipeline design, it can deliver the leading per-MHz performance with excellent energy efficiency. The N25F also has comprehensive options for its memory subsystem, including instruction and data caches, local memories with low-latency and predictable accesses, and ECC for L1 memory soft error protection.

To support flexible SoC construct, the N25F system bus can be configured as 64-bit AXI, 64-bit AHB, or 32-bit AHB, and there is also a slave port for direct local memory reads/writes. These capabilities ensure both speed and security in memory accesses. In addition, the Andes Customer Extension™ (ACE) framework offers additional flexibility through customized special purpose instructions.

With rich features and customized options, the N25F has been very popular in the embedded controller market. The Phison X1 SSD platform, an U.3 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD, is a product targeting the enterprise SSD market. Its great boost in random read IOPS is a crucial evidence for its suitability in AI training and application servers handling thousands of clients.

The X1 platform offers higher speed with lower energy consumption in a cost-effective solution that eliminates performance bottlenecks, significantly improves quality of service (QoS), and delivers the highest levels of data integrity and security for critical business applications. It was also recently awarded the 2023 Taiwan Excellence Award.