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Foremay leverages advanced engineering technologies and rigorous
manufacturing process controls to
deliver highly reliable,
ultra-high-performance, and secure SSD
and flash storage modules. These
solutions are designed to meet the
demanding requirements of diverse
customer environments, particularly in
industrial, enterprise, and
mission-critical computing
applications. Through continuous
innovation in flash management,
controller architecture, and data
protection mechanisms, Foremay ensures
optimal performance, endurance, and
data integrity across its military and
space grade storage products.
Some of the key advanced technologies
implemented in Foremay solid-state
drives include:
1. Radiation Hardening Technologies
Radiation hardening in Solid State Drives (SSDs) is the process
of making the drive resistant to
damage or data corruption caused by
ionizing radiation. While a standard
SSD works fine in your office
environment, it would likely fail
within days—or even minutes—in
environments like outer space, nuclear
power plants, or high-altitude flight.
Radiation causes two main types of
issues: Single Event Effects (SEE),
which are temporary glitches or "bit
flips," and Total Ionizing Dose (TID),
which is the long-term cumulative
physical degradation of the hardware.
Achieving a "space-grade" SSD requires a multi-layered approach,
ranging from the physical chemistry of
the chips to the logic of the
software.
1.1. Physical and Material Level
Specialized Substrates: Instead of
standard bulk silicon, manufacturers
often use Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI)
or Wide Bandgap semiconductors (like
Gallium Nitride). These materials
reduce the volume where
radiation-generated charge can
collect.
Shielding: Physical enclosures made of
high-density materials (like lead,
tungsten, or specialized polymers) are
used to block lower-energy particles.
However, shielding adds weight, which
is a major constraint in aerospace.
1.2. Circuit and Architecture Level
Redundancy (TMR): Triple Modular
Redundancy (TMR) is a hallmark of
rad-hard design. The system runs three
parallel instances of a circuit and
uses "voting" logic. If radiation
flips a bit in one circuit, the other
two "outvote" it to ensure the correct
output.
Hardened Latches: Replacing standard
transistors with "dual-interlocked"
cells (DICE) makes it much harder for
a single particle strike to change the
state of a memory bit.
1.3. Controller and Firmware Level
Aggressive Error Correction (ECC):
Standard SSDs use ECC, but
rad-hardened drives use much more
powerful algorithms (like Reed-Solomon
or advanced LDPC) to recover data from
multiple simultaneous bit errors.
Scrubbing: The firmware constantly
"scrubs" the background data. It reads
through the entire drive during idle
time to find and fix quiet bit flips
before they accumulate into unfixable
errors.
1.4. Component Choices: key components
inside rar-hard SSD, including NAND
flash, controller ASIC, power
management IC, PCB and Interconnects,
will also need to be radiation
hardened or ruggedized which will be
significantly more resilient to the
"noise" introduced by radiation.
2. Wear Leveling Technology
NAND flash has individually erasable
blocks, each of which can be put
through a finite number of erase
cycles before becoming unreliable.
That is, after a specific number of
cycles for each block, the error rate
can significantly increase.
Unfortunately, in most cases, the
flash media is not used evenly. In
certain areas, such as for the file
system, the data is updated more
frequently than for other areas, and
will wear out sooner in those areas.
Wear leveling mitigates this issue by
arranging data so that erasures and
re-writes are distributed evenly
across the entire device. Thus, no
single sector prematurely fails due to
a high concentration of program/erase
cycles. Foremay uses an advanced wear
leveling algorithm, which can
efficiently spread usage throughout
the entire flash media area. By
implementing both dynamic and static
wear leveling algorithms, the life
expectancy of the flash media can be
improved significantly.
3. Error Detection / Correction
Foremay's solid state drives implement
the BCH ECC Algorithm which is one of
the most powerful ECC algorithms in
the industry. This algorithm can
correct up to 12 random bit errors in
each 512 byte area.
4. Bad Block Management
Bad blocks are blocks that contain one
or more bits for which the reliability
is not guaranteed.
Bad blocks can occur when the flash is
shipped or can develop during the
usage.
Foremay implements an efficient bad
block management algorithm into the
solid state hard drive to detect
factory produced bad blocks as well as
those that develop over the lifetime
of the device. This process is
completely transparent to the user
through the use of S.M.A.R.T. command
tools, i.e., the user will not be
aware of the existence of the bad
blocks during operation.
5. S.M.A.R.T. Technology
S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring
Analysis and Reporting Technology.
S.M.A.R.T. was developed by a number
of major hard disk drive manufacturers
to increase the reliability of hard
drives. This technology enables
the PC to predict the future failure
of hard disk drives. S.M.A.R.T. has
become an industry standard for hard
drive manufacturers, and now
S.M.A.R.T. has also been incorporated
into Foremay's SSDs. Through the
S.M.A.R.T. system, our solid state
disk incorporates a suite of advanced
diagnostics that monitor the internal
operation of the drive and provide an
early warning for many types of
potential problems. When a potential
problem is detected, the SSD can be
repaired or replaced before any data
is lost or damaged. S.M.A.R.T.
monitors SSD performance, detects
faulty sectors, performs recalibration
and CRC error correction, etc. For
more information on Foremay’s
S.M.A.R.T. implementation and command
descriptions, please refer to our
datasheet.
6. NCQ Technology
NCQ stands for Native Command Queuing
technology. NCQ technology allows the
drive to manage multiple outstanding
commands more efficiently, which
significantly increases concurrent
access capability. It solves the
concurrent access bottleneck
associated with traditional HDDs in
some high concurrent access
applications such as on-line banking,
on-line ticketing and VOD. As part of
the latest Serial ATA specification,
NCQ requires an NCQ-capable SSD and
either a motherboard or a PCI adapter
card with NCQ support. NCQ technology
is incorporated into select SSDs from
Foremay.
7. Other SSD Technologies
Other Foremay SSD technologies include
compliance with RAID, power down
protection for data writing, hot plug
support, secure erase, hardware
encryption, write protect and active
garbage collection technologies that
bring Foremay with the world's
Fastest SSD.
8. High Reliability Manufacturing
Systems
Since enterprise, industrial and mission
critical applications require much more
reliable devices than typical consumer
products, a more sophisticated
production management system is
necessary to meet commercial and
industrial customers' requirements. The
key to providing reliable devices is a
product traceability and failure
analysis system. Foremay SSD's
manufacturing systems are ISO9001 and
ISO14001 certified. Our SSD products are
FCC, CE and RoHS certified. In addition,
we also have implemented statistic
process control and document control on
the manufacturing floor together with
monthly and quarterly internal audits
that ensure a controlled quality
environment to produce highly reliable
products. |