Phison E16

The Phison E16 (PS5016-E16) was Phison's first PCIe 4.0 x4 controller, released in 2020. Built on TSMC's 12nm process, it delivered sequential reads of up to 7,000 MB/s – a near-doubling of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth – and helped establish PCIe 4.0 as the new performance standard for consumer SSDs.

The E16 is an 8-channel controller supporting NVMe 1.4. Like other Phison designs, it was licensed to multiple brands under their own labels, resulting in near-identical drives from Seagate (FireCuda 520), Sabrent (Rocket 4), AORUS (Gen4 series), and Corsair (Force MP600). Differences between these drives come down to NAND source and firmware tuning rather than controller behavior.

The E16 was later supplanted by the E18 for high-end PCIe 4.0 designs, which offered improved random I/O and lower power consumption.