At CES, we went hands on with Phison's latest innovations with consumer and enterprise SSDs. The star attraction is the new PS5037-E37T, a DRAM-less SSD controller for mainstream and performance segment SSDs. This chip can drive SSDs across M.2-2280, 2242 and 2230 form-factors, and features 4 NAND flash channels. It is energy-efficient, as it's built on the TSMC 6 nm foundry node. Phison claims astonishing performance figures for its reference-design drive based on the E37T, with up to 14.7 GB/s sequential reads, and up to 13 GB/s sequential writes, along with 2 million IOPS 4K reads/writes. That's not all, its peak power (during an R/W operation) is under 2.3 W, making it ideal for notebooks. A CDM session of the E37T reference SSD was shown with 14925 MB/s reads, 13115 MB/s writes, and 8676 MB/s mixed loads. Such figures put the controller on par with the E26 Max14um revision, a flagship controller from 2024.

Next up is Phison's new flagship client SSD controller, the PS5028-E28, with 8 flash channels allowing drive capacities of up to 8 TB. This controller uses a DDR4 DRAM cache, which should give it superior random write performance. A maxed-out reference 8 TB SSD was shown clocking 14919 MB/s sequential reads, 14008 MB/s sequential writes, and the company claims up to 2.6 million IOPS 4K random reads, with up to 3 million IOPS 4K random writes. This controller pushes performance to the very edge of what's possible with PCI-Express 5.0 x4, accounting for interface overheads. Perhaps the best piece of news with this controller is power, and its peak R/W controller power is shown to be 4.5 W, which should mean drives with even passive heatsinks should sustain advertised performance, without the need for active cooling.