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YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmq7pahlTYI
Text:
Thanks folks for making time to attend this presentation. We've seen some great talks starting, you know,  with the OCP overview and Intel talking about  the need to enable the ecosystem to really see CXL thrive  and solve real problems for both hyperscaler  and enterprise customers. So today I'm going to talk about  the Montage Technology CXL controllers. I'm presenting on behalf of Jeff Finley. He's the worldwide VP of sales and business development. And I see Joe is online as well. So Joe, feel free to jump in at any time.

So before we jump into CXL,  it might be worth just giving a brief history  of Montage Technology and how this technology  has evolved into this CXL product. So Montage has been doing high-speed memory products  for almost two decades and leading the industry  in DDR4 and DDR5 interface products. So continuously, it's not just a first with CXL,  but actually for the past several years,  they've been setting and helping set the standards  and enable the industry around high-speed memory products. And Montage has taken a kind of a portfolio approach  to PCI connectivity solutions. So part of that solution also includes re-timers,  as you know, with PCI Gen4 and Gen5 signaling. And of course, everyone's talking about AI  and the clusters seem to just keep exploding  the size of the clusters. So obviously re-timing some of these signals  becomes critical to enable not only the reach,  but also the density. So this is another portfolio product  where Montage has made significant strides  around the world enabling customers. When we talk about CXL,  Montage was the first to ship CXL controllers. So that's a pretty significant milestone  as we talk about enabling the industry. Of course, there's some great ideas  and then Montage took the lead  and shipped the first CXL controller. And so while that is a great milestone,  an even more significant milestone is Montage  was the first to ship these CXL controllers  in a mass production format. And that involved design wins with key customers  all over the world. So as the theme of this forum has been,  how do we advance the ecosystem? How do we enable the industry? A big part of that is actually putting devices out there  and taking lead in letting customers test out the use cases,  flesh out new innovation early on. So a big focus of Montage technology  is also ecosystem enabling. So we want to advance the standards,  but then at the same time,  we want to make sure we're enabling the ecosystem  to take advantage of these new solutions coming out. And solutions, as I was explaining earlier,  it's kind of a portfolio of solutions  starting with high speed DDR  and then PCIe Gen4, Gen5 re-timers. And then that naturally leads into CXL,  which is a great way to combine the high speed expertise  that Montage has developed with DDR4, DDR5 memory products,  and then combining that with the experience gained  developing PCIe based products.

Let me go to the next slide. So of course, we've heard of all the great use cases  that the previous speaker spoke about. The need for memory expansion,  Neil spoke about the fact that at some point,  there's going to be a limit to how many pins  you can put on the package. So while it's great, you can continue adding DDR  as much as you can eventually need a CXL. But then at some point, of course,  CXL will also need to expand the capacity significantly. And that's where the CXL memory expander controller  that Montage has put out is serving that need  for expanding the memory as we spoke about,  but then also pooling. So when you combine these controllers  with high speed CXLs, which is at that point,  we really can enable the memory pooling use cases  that the industry standards have been working to enable. And to keep in mind, while it's great to enable  the two major use cases, if you will,  one is expanding the capacity. And then we heard previously examples  of how it's also critical to expand the bandwidth  of application because it's just so demanding,  especially some of these AI applications  really demanding on the bandwidth side. So that's where it becomes critical  to enable a low latency interconnect. So this is where the Montage technology controllers  come into play developing or delivering  the high bandwidth, high capacity,  but at the low latency that's required  to really service some of these applications. And a lot of these applications need to perform  in a non-blocking format. So that becomes pretty critical. And in fact, in the previous presentation,  we heard questions about tail latency. So that again, highlights the fact  that there is a lot of sensitivity  to the latency that these devices  will inject into the solution. So that's where the Montage controllers are,  they're compliant with all of the specifications,  especially JEDEC and then PCIe Gen 5 speeds. And we recognize customers will have different form factors. And our previous speaker spoke about  some of the various form factors  that need to be enabled for customers  for different use cases. Maybe it's a hyperscaler use case,  or maybe it's an enterprise use case. So that's where the Montage controllers  are designed actually to fit into both,  the add-in card type form factors,  or even the EDSFF memory module  and CXL pool memory type of use cases.

So moving on to the next slide. So of course, CXL as a technology is great. And then earlier when Micron was presenting  their questions about, yeah,  what is the price differential? So I think these are very important questions  that we as a collective ecosystem  need to be cognizant of. And really we all want to see the CXL  really take off in a significant way. So the way at least the Montage view of the market  is there are CXL capable servers  and then there are CXL enabled servers. So of course we want to see CXL capable servers  really proliferating the market  so that the industry and the use cases  start being proven out and that will drive customers  to really enable and take advantage  and populate those CXL servers to the maximum capacity. So this is where I think it's critical  for the ecosystem to come together,  to prove out the use cases  and help kind of drive the rapid adoption  of CXL technology.

Moving on, I spoke about the MXC Memory Expander Controller  from Montage. So this is just giving some more detail into the product. Of course, you may have seen,  or some of you may have seen some of the demos  done in partnership and I have a slide later on  just kind of showing that in case you missed that demo. But just to hit on a few key bullet points,  the MXC Memory Controller or Memory Expander rather  is available in both PCIe add-in cards  and EDSFF memory modules. And there's a wide range of flexibility  that's available to design with these expander controllers. And of course also support for all the data center features  in RAS, et cetera. And some of the use cases we heard of earlier  about maintaining the high bandwidth utilization  and efficiency. And of course, power, right? There's only a certain power budget that's available  as we develop these rack systems. And the other thing as we talk about ecosystem partnership. So today, Montage has partnered with Samsung and SK Hynix  in delivering some of these  and demonstrating some of these solutions  kind of in an end-to-end format.

Moving on, again, just a second level  flick down into some of the features  that the MXC controller offers. Of course, like we, not just I said before  but also the other speakers spoke about the need  for high bandwidth and then balancing that  with the low latency interconnect between the CPU and a CXL  so that you can continue to deliver this high performance  with this memory expansion tier, if you will. And so that's where the Montage CXL controller  provides several other flexibilities as well  including RISC-V microprocessor. So there's some flexibility available  and on these devices, as well as all of the  great capabilities to debug  and then monitor some of these systems. So those are of course part of the controller design. And then as we talk about the DDR controller,  so of course there are two sides to the MXC controller. One that's facing the CXL side  which is compliant with all of the CXL specifications  and of course the .mem, .io protocols. But then on the other side of the controller  where it's facing the DDR channels,  that's where of course it's critical to be compliant  with the JEDEC standards and support both the UDIMM, RDIMM  and also various speeds that are required for the operation. And then there are definitely optimizations available  for low power consumption as well as for IO equalization  to really extract the maximum performance  out of the interconnect.

So I think again, we've all seen this kind of  memory hierarchy pyramid, but just to reemphasize the point,  I won't dwell too much on it. But of course, direct attached memory as we know  is not able to keep up with the capacity requirements. So delivering these kinds of memory expansion solutions,  accommodating a large number of DRAM chips  and delivering this at a low power, high capacity format  while still being within a one NUMA hop to the processor. That's what the MXC controller is really delivering.

 And in terms of readiness, I spoke before  that the MXC controllers of course,  so we're the first to not only come out,  but then also first to mass produce. So the status is all major memory suppliers  and all major SoC suppliers have definitely  this readiness. So get in touch with your modules providers. If you're looking to deliver these CXL based solutions  for the end customers.

I spoke earlier about kind of the ecosystem coming together. So this is just one example. This is a demo that was done previously  with the MemVerge memory viewer and then the montage controller  and then showing the interoperability  with different memory manufacturers as well. So definitely if this is something of interest  or you haven't seen this demo before,  definitely check out this demo.

 And in terms of call to action,  you can work directly with montage. If you're interested in using these controllers, of course,  so you can also work directly  with some of the memory solution providers  if you're looking for the actual end product. And then some of the links listed out here,  that's where you can go for more information. And of course, feel free to contact me  if further information is required. And with that, just being sensitive to time,  I just want to say thank you again for listening.