 Hi, my name is Frank Chen, I'm the CEO and CTO of Existen, so we want to welcome you to Embedded World 2023. And what do you do in the embedded world? So we are a storage provider, so we do full service custom storage for industrial, aerospace, automotive and cinema. So we're here to showcase our storage products. And it's like hybrid reliability, when you're in industrial products, flash storage is a great way to do industrial. Yes, so compared to traditional HEVs where they're kind of perceptible, they're susceptible to vibration shock, you know, different air pressure. But SSDs flash, they're made of completely made of ICs, so they're not susceptible to any shock and vibration, any thermal issues, any altitude issues. So this is where we build hybrid reliability storage. So what are we looking at here? So what we're looking at here is an industrial grade solid-state drive. This is our own custom design where we design all of the hardware, the firmware, we do all the testing internally, we do all of our home manufacturing. It supports up to 8 terabytes and very low power. So compared to a traditional HDD where you see like a 3.5 inch HDD, that's about, you know, 4 to 5 times the size of a 2.5 inch. So it can store much more capacity, it's got a much higher storage density compared to HDDs. Are there algorithms you can work on to make things more reliable and a data to be safe, no matter what? Definitely, basically we own all of the firmware, so we develop all of our hardware and we write all of our firmware for SSDs. So that includes several important critical components like flash management, data integrity and data security. So we also implement RAID functionality on our SSDs so that we can recover data in a background transparently in case there are data corruption or something happens to the data. What is the whole process of getting data out of a broken device or device that has issues to recover? So like most of the vendors will tell you that you cannot recover data from a broken SSD which is quite incorrect because if you own all of the base technology from the hardware to the firmware then you should be able to recover the data. In an event something like this, the data needs to be retrieved from this, maybe some hardware issue with this drive, we take apart the case and we'll actually connect the driver with our debugging tool. From the debugging tool we'll be able to reinitialize the drive and initiate the drive recovery process. And you sometimes include that as part of the service? Yes, we include data recovery as part of our differentiated service because we're able to go much more beyond file system level data recovery going to hardware level data recovery and firmware level data recovery. And you have data recovery around the world? Yes, we support this by either remote recovery or we can have FBE outside to do the recovery or you can send in a device to us, we can do a factory level data recovery. And there's many different kinds of storage that you do, huh? Yes, so for industrial we have various form factors, this is a 2.5 inch which is optimized for thermal so that means you can operate without any thermal solutions or like fans or air flows to cool off the drive. It will be able to run at full speed at 85C. So these are M.2, 2280, 2242 and 2230 so they don't have a casing so additional thermal solution needs to be applied. And we work with our customers to come up with the most optimum solution for thermal mitigation. In addition we also have a firmware ATC algorithm which automatically adjusts performance to ensure that the drive operates at an optimum performance in any thermal condition. Because these kind of storage products can get pretty hot. Yes. It's one of the things, sometimes I touch the SSDs and stuff, it's pretty hot and it's a challenge. Yes, it is. Design things correctly. Yes. So really it starts off from the component. We don't sort commercial flash and build them as industrial grade. So these all of our components are industrial grade. So we buy industrial controllers of our SSD controller vendor. We buy industrial grade flash and we also package our industrial grade flash. Because sometimes the amazing magic factories that kind of make SSD none and all this stuff. They also have patents in certain ways of doing things. You can use those or do differently, customize the way the algorithms are designed. Yes. So basically we have our own patents on how we manage our flash, how we optimize our performance. So we found over 70 patents worldwide on our SSD technology. Nice. And you're tightly collaborating with the R&D of the next gen I guess. Yes. Because the way you design the memory, you have to think about firmware early, about how you want to design it, right? Yes. So we work very closely with our controller vendor, which is Marvell, on their next generation, on their future roadmap controllers. And we work very closely with the NAND flash vendors like Kyosha, WD and Micron, Samsung and Pynex. And do they sometimes collaborate with you on the end product like even they might use themselves as separately or you only keep your expertise only your brand? We're open to collaboration, but mostly we do our own. But we collaborate with a lot of partners. They're not necessarily flash vendors or controller vendors, but we work with partners like NVIDIA, Mercedes, we work with partners like QNAP to help them build and help ourselves build ecosystems for storage or flash storage. So when people buy a self-driving car or EV or some cool products, I'm not going to ask exactly what, but they might be your storage in some of the cool products in the world? Yes. Some of our storage is in some of the most unexpected places for high performance and high capacity applications. So it could be somewhere flying in the air. In space? Maybe. Low orbit satellites, airplanes, underwater exploration, oil and gas, automotive, industrial, medical, you name it, we're pretty much in there. So all these guys developing cutting edge things, they know how to contact you and say, hey, I need this performance and you might be able to provide it. Yes. And not only that, but not only do we do cutting edge, we also do trading edge because our goal is to serve our customers, no matter what their needs are. So as long as we are able to provide differentiated service, whether it be performance, capacity, power, or security, or any other features that our customer want, we're happy to implement for them and support them. Nice. Can you show some of the other storage products you have here? This is a unique product that we have. This is the PI4 series E1.S. So it's the first of its kind. It's an enterprise form factor storage, but optimized for industrial and automotive applications. So for industrial, it's minus four to 85 with encryption, TCG opal. And for automotive, we actually added conformal coating and we added BG underfill so that it's shock and vibration optimized and it's protected against elements like salt, humidity, and things like that. So this could be in some amazing cars. Or airplanes. Or boats. Yes. All kinds. Yes. Nice. What next do you want to show? Next, we probably want to show you our... It's durable. This is our automotive grade PCIe 2.5 inch UDOT2. So again, like we said, we have BG underfill. We have conformal coating. This is up to a terabyte. And this runs at about half or one third of the typical data center SSD. So the whole drive runs at 7.5 watts. So it runs very cool. It's optimized for minus 40 to 85 wide range of temperature. Let's say by the best 2024 affordable self-driving EV, why does it need to have so much storage? What is an electric car, for example, doing with all this storage? Actually, most production cars don't need that much storage. They probably only need maybe up to 512 gigabytes of storage. These are actually, right now, used by the car makers to log a lot of autonomous data, 8S data logging. Because they cannot just upload all this. It's a lot of data. It's too much for upload. Yes, it's too much for upload to the cloud. So they need a very high performance, high capacity, local cache to store that data that they can later take that and upload to the data center. All right. So it's special development cars, maybe? Yes, yes, yes. It's not necessarily mass production. Yes, for mass production, we actually have another line of products that are called BG SSDs. So they're BG PCI SSDs built for production level cars. So they're smaller in capacity, but also very high performance. Nice. And it could be like Formula 1 car that could be tested. And while they're testing it and optimizing it, they want to store a thousand different sensor data on the car while they race around. Yes, it'll be stored on these drives. Potentially. Yes. All right. Well, these are all automotive-grade SATA drives. So they're a little bit slower than PCIe, but they also come with the same shock and vibration, environmental protection at a SATA 8TB. So they're still very high performance, but maybe not so high compared to PCIe, but they're also very low power. So they're about one-third of the power consumption of PCIe. So for those applications that doesn't require very high data rates, but very high capacity, maybe they want to store large amounts of data over a long period of time, that would be an ideal solution. Because Flash 3D now, all this stuff, sounds amazing. The question is, how long is it going to last? I have so many hard drives, I don't know if they still work. It's hard to, can you give a number? Yes, so we believe that with the proper firmware, if you store at room temperature, these drives will last you at least once you store it. Once you put the data on there, these drives will last you at least five years with the proper algorithms to ensure that the retention hold up over time. Do you think if somebody finds this in a hundred years, there's a chance it still works? That would be kind of iffy, actually. Yeah, unless you're running this in a lower bit more like PSLC mode, then it's probably more likely. As long as you don't put too much data, if you don't wear out the drive too much, like in terms of writing too much data to it, and if you put it in PSLC mode, I think it may be able to last that long. I did that video once with some researchers, they were talking about 3D NAND, and it sounds so fascinating, but it sounds like potentially you could one day maybe get more storage than hard drives for cheaper. What's that going to happen? Is it going to overtake at some point? We're seeing that happening for one terabyte. I mean, at one terabyte below, we're seeing the SSD cost is actually getting lower than HDD. So I think as we continue to scale down or scale up on capacity, within two, three years, it'll be two terabytes and keep going. I do see that happening, and we do see there's going to be scaling them at HDDs in terms of how much capacity can actually carry. Is there a chance that the capacity might exceed hard drive? I think it's very possible. Could you suddenly overtake and be like 80 terabytes or something? Yes, so by the end of this year, we'll have a 2.5 inch, that's 32 terabyte. End of this year? Wow. So it's very likely to happen. That's pretty much overtaking, kind of. It's kind of like overtaking. Yes, but it gets kind of expensive. So not on a cost-wise, but definitely on their capacity, I mean, on a form factor, because most HDDs are 3.5 inch, right? So this is 2.5. So per volume density, the storage density of SSDs are already way past HDD. No chance you can make some 32 terabytes that are affordable. That'd be so cool. Yeah, maybe 10 years from now. I'll throw all my hard drives away. Well, actually, in my household, I don't have any hard drives in that left. So I recently upgraded my NAS with our 8 terabyte SATA and it was a very enjoyable experience because now you can rebuild RAID at at least 100 times faster than running an HDD. At least two, you know? You need to mirror everything. So I bought five. I got five. I got a discount because we build drives. All right. I must be really fast. Yeah. So what are you showing here? So these are industrial SATA. I think they're minus 40 to 85. Kind of like the automotive except without the coating and the BG interfilm. So these are very, very, very small factors of SATA. The M-SATAs, the 2280s. You actually do show rockets. Yes. Well, airplanes. Because they vibrate a lot. Yes. Yes. So our connectors, they have to be mill 8, 8, 110D certified. We also build custom storage where we actually build ethanol, our drives actually build with ethanol or samtech connectors. That's shock and thermal, shock and vibration. Yeah. Resistant. Nice. It sounds awesome. Yes. These kind of technology, these cables. Sometimes I've seen, like in the video world, I've seen sometimes they have an HDMI with the screws. You kind of screw them so it doesn't fall out. Yes, yes, yes. You have the similar kind of stuff for SATA connectors and everything. Actually for, we're building one that's not just for SATA and PCIe, but we're building one USB storage that has automotive grade USB. So it's protected against shock and vibration. Nice. Cool. Yeah. What snakes do you want to show here? Well, since you're using camera, we can talk about cinema, SD cards, micro SD cards. Because your market is all the professional video makers also? Yes. We have a big market on cinema, so you can buy our products on Amazon, on the e-commerce platforms. We want to showcase our industrial grade CF Express and CFast cards so they can go up to two terabyte for CFast and one terabyte for CFast. So, like I said, we are leading the edge, we are leading edge on CF Express, but we also continue to support our trading edge technology like CFast. Now this is really high bit rate video supported on these. Yes. It says max sequential grade. Oh, that's CFast. Yeah. You want to look at CF Express. This one? Yes. So we can do 1500 megabytes, 1.5 gigabytes of stain with the proper cooling. That's a lot of pictures. A big raw 8K video. Yes. 8K 120. I don't know. 8K is probably 2 gigabytes. So it's getting close to 2. It's getting close to 8K. So you're going to support it. When all these cameras come available soon, there's already some, but when more and more cameras become available, you'll have the storage for it. Yes. So we actually support Canon R5, R3. We support the Nikon Z9. We're the fastest card for my Nikon Z9. We also support the Panasonic GH6. We also have a certified card with red, one of the premier Hollywood cameras for filmmaking. These red guys, they do a lot of 8K stuff. Right now they're not 8K yet, but the CFXpress will be able to support 8K in the future. How is on these forums with rumors, when people chat about the next generation cameras, I wondered if they could do RAID recording, not just copying, but speeding up when you have two cards. It's 1,500 plus 1,500, and at the same time, you might even have multiple copies. So that would be a little challenging for the camera vendors because that's a lot of power consumption. But with the CFXpress cards, what's different about CFXpress versus MicroSD and SD is the controller is much more powerful. So they can do a lot more for the user in terms of data protection, in terms of data integrity. So with CFXpress, we're pretty confident that you don't even need to do backups anymore. Just one card would be enough, and if something goes bad, we still have our data recovery service that can help users recover their data. Because with my SD cards, I like to do recording, but that's the SD card, it's a different controller. The controller is completely different. It's a much more cost-conscious controller compared to PCIe, so the capability is also limited, especially on air correction. And you also have the small one, the Type A. Yes, we also have the Type A card. It's right here. So for the Type A card, we took a different route compared to Sony. We actually did all of our own PCB design, and we did all of our own casing design. So that's where we were able to push the limits of CF Type A capacity pretty high there. So right now we're offering up to 480GB on the Type A, but very soon we'll offer 1TB. Wow. Is that going to be the best Type A? 1TB? We believe it will be a very good cost performance for the Type A market. And it's also very low power. But in the Sony, for example, the A7 S3, they have dual slots. Yes. So you back up record to those Type A. So it's actually, for Sony cameras, there's actually limits on what you can do with the backup recording because on the SD card side, the most you can do is V90. So you cannot record very high resolution at V90 rates. So even if you want to, you know, back up on your SD card, there's certain resolution that would not be doable. But if you have two, they have two slots for the Type A, I think. Well, if they have two slots, then they can do back up. But I'm not sure if they can support two slots at the same time. Because it's a lot of power. Well, it's a lot of power, and you need to design with two-piece, with two-piece lane, which I'm not sure if Sony supports that or not. So Canon has been doing some AK cameras like the R5, I think it's called, and all that. Yes, and the R3, and they can have an R1. They totally support those. Yes. You have great storage for them. Yes, yes. And you have a lot of customers in the US and Europe or Asia or where? Yeah, we have a lot of customers across these three big regions. And you can go on the Amazon for these regions and they will be there. Yes, so Amazon is our main outlet for MB&H. Amazon, B&H are our main outlet for media card type of products. But then Mouser is more for our B2B products. How about a camera store that wants to resell those? They just contact you and place a big order. Normally we have our distributor in the US. Our distributor in the US is OneSource Video. So that's where we supply all of our cards to OneSource and they can distribute across the US. And here I see a rugged SSD. Oh, yes. This is a portable SSD that we can provide for the cinema world. And the creators, content creators definitely need to get on board with these kind of rugged SSDs. Yeah, so basically it's IP67, water and dust proof. So you can take this anywhere. Like, you know, anywhere where there's water, dust, humidity, salt, it's well protected for that kind of use environment. And we build a very high capacity drive storage for this USB. It's up to 8TB. So imagine, you know, the amount of content can put out to this drive. And because it's such a high capacity, we really design this to be high performance. So it's about, we can sustain 2GB per second at, you know, 50 to 60 degrees Celsius. 2GB per second. What is the connection? Because I have one of these N1 Pro MacBooks and they say they support 40GB per second. That's a thunderbolt. But I don't know if there's any external hard drives that support the 20 or something. Yes, this is, this supports 20. 20 for sure. 20 for sure. For those MacBooks. On the new MacBooks probably, yeah. So, because they were talking about USB 3.2 Gen2 or something. Yes, this is USB 3.2 Gen2 by 2. Ah, they're supporting that. So, you totally got the 20. Because some of these Sandisk products, Sandisk was saying it's 20, but actually it only supported 10GB on the MacBooks. So what's so different about this storage is we don't use SLC cache to show like a bursty performance. Like, you know, like you can do 2GB for 2 seconds and the rest is 1GB or even less. We try to make sure that you can record across the whole drive at a sustained 2GB per second data rate. So what that means is really, you can offload or you can load the whole drive in one hour. 8TB of data in one hour. That's amazing. So, you know, I know a lot of cinematographers complain to us about how they're using HDD. It takes them forever to transfer media. With this, you get at least 20x acceleration on data offload. And so that means you have the controller in there that supports that latest USB 10 and stuff. Yes, so we optimized the whole performance power thermal to be used for USB Type-C. What's amazing with that solution is that people should get the MacBook with not so much internal storage. Just get one of those. Oh yes. And then they can do all their video editing 4K60 off the external, fully smooth. Same experience like if it's internal. Maybe even faster. Maybe even faster. We're actually pretty confident that it should be faster because NAND Flash's performance is limited by capacity. So at 8TB, you have no performance limit. It can saturate the USB 3.2 Gen2 by 2. Because the M1, M2, M2 chips that Apple is selling, pretty amazing. But it's nice for them to keep the storage external so you dissipate the heat. Keep it outside your MacBook and save some money and put the money into external storage. You probably get more per dollar. Yeah, not only that. They charge quite a bit for an additional 256GB and 512GB, right? Extreme. Think about it. For the same money, you can get 8TB and it runs faster. I always choose the lowest one and I want to go for the external and get much more storage per dollar. So people use this for direct video editing. Like high-def video editing. Here in the front, you have a demonstration. You're showing it to booths. Oh, yes. This is... So pretty much this is what we're doing with conformal coating. So the drive is conformal coated and it'll operate as if it's not in water. Is it something like what they were talking about P2I or these kind of guys that are putting it some kind of oven and then it gets coated by something? Yes. So we actually have an automated manufacturing process that coats the PCB with a humus seal and it's cured in an oven for about two hours. Once that's done, there are protective coating forms on the PCB that protects against water. But that's not all of your storage, right? Some of them. Some of them. It's an optional manufacturing process. And then that's the ultimate liquid cooling. Well, we don't really need the liquid cooling because the drives are actually fairly low power. Yeah. No need to liquid cool. Yeah. But you're showing that it works and you're showing that it just keeps working even though it's in water. Yes, yes. Cool. So a busy, embedded world. Yes. Lots of potential embedded industry people talking to you about. We're excited to be back here. Last year the crowd wasn't as much as this year. So we're looking forward to meeting more customers and sharing with them more of our products and services.