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Application of Crystal Oscillators in Solid State Drives (SSDs)

2025-01-22

Solid State Drive (SSD) is a storage device based on flash memory technology, used to replace traditional mechanical hard drives (HDD). It stores data through NAND flash memory chips without mechanical moving parts, therefore it has the characteristics of fast read and write speed, strong seismic performance, and low power consumption. The performance of SSD mainly depends on the interface type (such as SATA, PCIe) and protocol (such as NVMe), and is widely used in fields such as personal computers, data centers, embedded devices, AI computing power, etc. Compared to traditional hard drives, SSDs significantly improve system response speed and stability, and are one of the important components of modern computing devices.

Crystal oscillators play a crucial role in solid-state drives (SSDs), primarily used to provide high-precision clock signals to ensure stability and accuracy in data transmission and storage. Specific applications include:
1. Clock reference of the main control chip: providing a stable operating frequency for the main control chip to ensure the reliability of data processing.
2. Interface standard support: High speed interfaces such as SATA, PCIe, and NVMe require crystal oscillators to support high frequency and low phase noise.
3. Data synchronization: Crystal oscillators help achieve synchronization between controllers and storage chips, improving storage efficiency and data integrity.

Solid state drives (SSDs) mainly use crystal oscillators with the following frequencies:
1.27 MHz: Commonly used in high-performance PCIe or NVMe SSDs to meet high-speed transmission requirements.
2.40 MHz: Supports specific storage controllers and interfaces, especially for high-end devices.
3.25 MHz/50MHz: commonly used to support SATA interface specifications and ensure data transmission stability.
4.100 MHz/200MHz: When using FPGA chip solutions, differential crystal oscillator LVDS output is used, which requires more stable performance of the crystal oscillator and is suitable for high-speed data transmission, anti-interference, and low-power applications.

The specific frequency selection depends on the design requirements of the SSD main control chip and interface standards. A stable clock source is crucial for SSD performance and reliability.
Selection requirements: high stability, good seismic and drop resistance, high temperature resistance, anti-interference and low power consumption.
1. High stability: usually using high-precision ± 10ppm@25 ℃, high stability ± 30ppm@-40 +105℃
2. Small size: The commonly used packaging size is 3225/2520/2016, which provides better shock and drop resistance;
3. High temperature resistance: Due to the high heat generated by high-speed operation of hard drives and their use in enclosed spaces, it is required that their operating temperature meet the temperature range of industrial grade or above (-40~+105 ℃/-40~+125 ℃), with higher requirements for reliability, high temperature resistance, and other advantages.
4. Anti interference and low power consumption: Adopting 100/200MHz LVDS differential LVDS output, it has low jitter and good anti-interference performance, and can be used in 1.8V low-power models.