Kioxia announced the industry's first 2 TB microSDXC memory card working prototypes.
The SD Association’s SDXC specification has supported memory cards up to 2TB for more than a decade – but 2TB cards have not been successfully manufactured until now.
Mass production of the KIOXIA 2TB microSDXC memory cards is scheduled to begin in 2023.
Kioxia is now shipping new CM7 series NVMe SSDs designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.5-inch form factors.
The EDSFF E3 family enables the next generation of SSDs with PCIe 5.0 technology and beyond to address future data center architectures, while supporting a variety of new devices and applications. It provides improved airflow and thermals, signal integrity benefits, eliminates the need for LEDs on the drive carriers, and gives options for larger SSD capacity points.
KIOXIA CM7 Series highlights include:
https://www.kioxia.com/en-jp/top.html
Kioxia's XFMEXPRESS XT2 will be available in in 256GB and 512GB models and is designed for ultra-mobile PCs, IoT devices and various embedded applications.
First introduced in August of 2019, and then presented as a proposal to the JEDEC Subcommittee for Electrical Specifications and Command Protocols, KIOXIA XFMEXPRESS is a new form factor for PCIe/NVMe devices.
Kioxia and Western Digital agreed to jointly invest in the first phase of the Fab7 (Y7) manufacturing facility at Kioxia’s Yokkaichi Plant in the Mie Prefecture of Japan.
This joint-venture investment adds a sixth flash memory manufacturing facility to the Yokkaichi Plant, enhancing its position as the world's largest flash memory manufacturing site. The first phase of the Y7 facility will produce 3D flash memory including 112- and 162-layer and future nodes.
“We are very pleased to further deepen our strategic partnership with Western Digital through this joint investment in Y7,” said Nobuo Hayasaka, President and CEO of Kioxia. “The rapid digitization of societies underpins accelerating use of memory products. We will continue to leverage our technological partnership and economies of scale to develop and produce cutting-edge semiconductor products and achieve organic corporate growth.”
“This joint investment in Y7 accentuates our productive and positive relationship with Kioxia, underscoring our substantial global share in memory, the ongoing importance of memory and storage and our multi-faceted commitment to Japan,” said Dr. Siva Sivaram, President, Technology & Strategy, Western Digital. “Our strategic partnership with Kioxia has led to the introduction of leading-edge technology while increasing the scale of manufacturing and R&D capabilities. We look forward to continuing to drive long-term success together.”
Kioxia held a groundbreaking ceremony for a state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication facility (Fab2) at its Kitakami Plant in Iwate Prefecture, Japan.
The Fab2 facility will have an earthquake-absorbing structure and environmentally friendly design that utilizes advanced energy saving manufacturing equipment and renewable energy sources. In addition, an administration building will be constructed to accommodate the control management and technical departments in response to the increased staff.
“As a leader in memory, this Fab2 facility will become Kioxia’s key manufacturing hub to produce our memory products at scale. We are planning to introduce automated in-facility transfers and advanced production control to make Fab2 a truly world-class smart fabrication facility,” said Nobuo Hayasaka, President and CEO, Kioxia.
Kioxia is the first to introduce a data center SSD with a PCIe 5.0 interface, which doubles the bandwidth over PCIe 4.0 from 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) to 32GT/s. The CD8 Series is now available for customer evaluation.
Additional features include:
Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) marked the 35th anniversary of the company’s invention of NAND flash memory.
Since starting at zero 35 years ago, the NAND flash market has grown to $70B1. In terms of die density, flash memory has grown from 4Mb to 1.33Tb – a 333,000x increase2. To put this exponential growth in perspective, in the 1990s, the largest available density flash memory could hold 1/8 of a photo. Flash forward to today, where the largest available die density is a whopping 1.33Tb – and capable of storing 39,000 photos.
“Flash memory is a game-changer that continues to stand the test of time,” said Scott Nelson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for KIOXIA America, Inc. “Imagine what’s to come – will the vision of smart cities be realized? Will truly autonomous cars take us from place to place? Whatever the future holds, KIOXIA will continue to lead the way forward, investing in and evolving the technology that makes storage densities higher and costs lower. The sky is the limit for flash memory, and the next wave of applications that will further enrich our lives is just around the corner. In some ways, we’re just getting started.”
Western Digital and Kioxia, its joint venture partner, announced that contamination of certain material used in its manufacturing processes has occurred and is affecting production operations at both its Yokkaichi and Kitakami flash fabrication facilities in Japan.
The anomoly concerns production of three-dimensional (3D) flash memory BiCS FLASH at both plants. Kioxia does not anticipate that shipment of its conventional 2D NAND flash memory will be affected.
Western Digital said its current assessment of the impact is a reduction of its flash availability of at least 6.5 exabytes.
https://about.kioxia.com/en-jp/news/2022/20220210-1.html
Western Digital investor presentation
KIOXIA America is now shipping its new EM6 Series Enterprise NVMe-oF™ solid state drives (SSDs) for Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) systems.
The drives use the Marvell 88SN2400 NVMe-oF SSD converter controller that converts an NVMe SSD into a dual-ported 25Gb NVMe-oF SSD
KIOXIA says the platform exposes the entire SSD bandwidth to the network.
EM6 Series Key Features
Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) and Western Digital announced their sixth-generation, 162-layer 3D flash memory technology, increasing the manufactured bits per wafer by 70 percent and I/O performance by 66%.
Kioxia's sixth-generation 3D flash memory moves beyond conventional eight-stagger memory hole array and achieves up to 10 percent greater lateral cell array density compared to the fifth-generation technology. This lateral scaling advancement, in combination with 162 layers of stacked vertical memory, enables a 40 percent reduction in die size compared to the 112-layer stacking technology, optimizing cost.
The Kioxia and Western Digital teams also applied Circuit Under Array CMOS placement and four-plane operation, which together deliver nearly 2.4 times improvement in program performance and 10 percent improvement in read latency compared to the previous generation. I/O performance also improves by 66 percent, enabling the next-generation interface to support the ever-increasing need for faster transfer rates.
“As Moore’s Law reaches its physical limits across the semiconductor industry, there’s one place where Moore’s Law continues its relevancy — that’s in flash,” said Dr. Siva Sivaram, President of Technology & Strategy, Western Digital. “To continue these advances and meet the world’s growing data demands, a new approach to 3D flash memory scaling is critical. With this new generation, Kioxia and Western Digital are introducing innovations in vertical as well as lateral scaling to achieve greater capacity in a smaller die with fewer layers. This innovation ultimately delivers the performance, reliability and cost that customers need.”
“Through our strong partnership that has spanned two decades, Kioxia and Western Digital have successfully created unrivaled capabilities in manufacturing and R&D,” said Masaki Momodomi, Chief Technology Officer, Kioxia. “Together, we produce over 30 percent1 of the world’s flash memory bits and are steadfast in our mission to provide exceptional capacity, performance and reliability at a compelling cost. We each deliver this value proposition across a range of data-centric applications from personal electronics to data centers as well as emerging applications enabled by 5G networks, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems.”
