TechPowerUp and KIOXIA come together to bring you a change to win one of three KIOXIA Exceria client SSDs. The Exceria range of SSDs span 2.5-inch SATA and M.2 NVMe form-factors, and combine KIOXIA's in-house BiCS flash memory, and the legacy of being the inventors of flash memory. Up for grabs are a KIOXIA Exceria Plus G2 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSD, a KIOXIA Exceria 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD, and a KIOXIA Exceria SATA 960 GB SSD. The Giveaway is open worldwide (wherever legal), entries close on January 9, 2022. To participate, simply fill up a brief form to help us get back to you if you've won. All the best!

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According to research from Mordor Intelligence, the facial recognition market was valued at USD 3.72 billion in 2020, and is projected to be valued at USD 11.62 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of approximately 21.71% over the forecast period. Facial recognition technology is finally coming into its own. It has gone beyond police officers looking for a suspect on a surveillance camera. Now, smart AI-driven facial recognition technology is common in smart retail, finance, transportation and even healthcare applications. But as adoption spreads, facial recognition devices are being required to operate in ever-more-challenging locations and environments. Keeping all these developments in mind, Apacer developed and has now released the CH120 series of industrial cards powered by the latest 112-layer BiCS5 3D TLC NAND technology, optimized for both AI facial recognition and smart IoT applications.

BiCS5 promises concrete, measurable advantages for SSDs, as it greatly improves capacity while keeping transmission latency ultra-low. In fact, Apacer's A2-grade CH120 series offers 4,000/2,000 IOPS for 4K image read/write performance. And compromised environments won't slow these cards down either - their wide temperature range means they operate smoothly in temperatures as low as -40 and as high as 85 degrees Celsius. The CH120 series of industrial cards are also equipped with value-adding over-provisioning and SLC-liteX technology. The former drastically reduces write amplification, extending an SSD's operational lifespan, while the latter allows an SSD to increase its endurance to up to 30,000 P/E cycles. That's 10 times higher than standard 3D TLC SSDs.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that it has bolstered its lineup of PCIe 4.0 solid state drives (SSDs) with the addition of the KIOXIA BG5 Series. Designed to bring a suitable balance of performance, cost and power to everyday gamers and PC users, the KIOXIA BG5 Series is built with a PCIe 64 GT/s interface (Gen4 x4 lanes) and accelerated by the company's fifth-generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology.

As a virtual multi-LUN (VML)-enabled client SSD, the KIOXIA BG5 Series unlocks back-end flash performance while maintaining affordability, making it an especially attractive option for a wide range of commercial and consumer notebooks and desktops. KIOXIA BG5 SSDs also support the latest Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology to realize a finely optimized DRAM-less SSD. The KIOXIA BG5 ships in a compact M.2 2230 single-sided, thermally optimized form factor enabling mobility and work-from-home lifestyles. M.2 2280 single-sided form factor versions are also available.

Delivering on the promise of SSDs that address future enterprise infrastructure requirements, KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced production-ready availability of its 9.5 mm XD6 Series Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S data center class SSDs. Introduced in late 2020, KIOXIA XD6 drives were the first EDSFF E1.S SSDs to address the specific requirements of hyperscale applications, including the performance, power and thermal requirements of the Open Compute Platform (OCP) NVMe Cloud SSD Specification. XD6 series also supports popular E1.S 15 mm and 25 mm form factor options, providing the flexibility to select the right balance of cooling through different E1.S heatsink options.

Representing the latest innovation in flash storage for servers in cloud and hyperscale data centers, KIOXIA EDSFF E1.S SSDs are designed to optimize system density, efficiency and management. As defined by the EDSFF consortium and leveraging the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the small form factor E1.S replaces the M.2 form factor and delivers greater density, performance, reliability, and thermal management. E1.S is also designed to be hot pluggable for increased serviceability, which is another benefit over M.2.

A new era for flash used in servers and storage is here, and it's being introduced by KIOXIA America, Inc. Today, the company announced the industry's first lineup of Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S SSDs designed with PCIe 5.0 technology - the CD7 Series. Building on the KIOXIA E3.S full-function development vehicle that received a 'Best in Show' award at last year's Flash Memory Summit, the CD7 Series E3.S increases flash storage density per drive for optimized power efficiency and rack consolidation.

Breaking free from the design limitations of the 2.5-inch form factor, the EDSFF E3 family is optimized for the needs of high-performance, highly efficient servers and storage. EDSFF enables the next generation of SSDs to address future data center architectures, while supporting a variety of new devices and applications. It provides improved airflow and thermals, signal integrity benefits, and options for larger SSD capacity points. EDSFF standardizes status LEDs on the drive, which eliminates the need for LEDs on the drive carriers. Support for higher E3.S power budgets than 2.5-inch form factor SSDs and better signal integrity allows EDSFF to deliver the performance promised by PCIe 5.0 technology and beyond.

Low latency, high endurance Storage Class Memory (SCM) is coming to KIOXIA SSDs. KIOXIA America, Inc. is now sampling its FL6 Series enterprise NVMe SCM SSDs. Featuring the KIOXIA SCM solution, XL-FLASH, the dual-port and PCIe 4.0-compliant KIOXIA FL6 Series SSDs bridge the gap between DRAM and TLC-based drives, making them well-suited to latency-sensitive use cases such as caching layer, tiering and write logging.

Based on KIOXIA's innovative BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology with 1-bit-per-cell SLC, XL-FLASH SCM brings low latency and high performance to data center and enterprise storage. While volatile memory solutions such as DRAM provide the access speed needed by demanding applications, it comes at a high cost. SCM addresses this by providing high density, lower cost non-volatile flash memory.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced sampling of its newest generation of 256 and 512 gigabyte (GB) Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices. Housed in 0.8 and 1.0 mm-high packages, the new products improve performance by 30% for random read and 40% for random write - making them thinner and faster than their predecessors. The new KIOXIA UFS devices utilize the company's most current, high-performance BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and are targeted to a variety of mobile applications.

The broad set of power and space conscious applications that utilize embedded flash memory continue to need higher performance and density, and UFS has increasingly been the solution of choice. From a total GB perspective, UFS now accounts for the majority of the demand relative to e-MMC. According to Forward Insights, when combining overall UFS and e-MMC GB demand worldwide, almost 70% of the demand this year is for UFS, and this will continue to grow.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced sampling of its 1 terabyte (TB) Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices. Housed in a 1.1 mm-high package - making it the thinnest 1 TB UFS offering available - the new product utilizes KIOXIA's BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and achieves sequential read speed of up to 2,050 MB/sec and sequential write speed of up to 1,200 MB/sec.

Mobile devices are constantly evolving, and 5G networks are poised to deliver levels of speed, scale and complexities the likes of which have never been seen before. Reaping the connectivity benefits of 5G - namely, faster downloads and reduced lag time - requires high performance and low power consumption. Additionally, with 5G making it easier and faster for users to store even more on their mobile devices, the storage requirements for smartphones and other applications are increasing at a rapid pace. KIOXIA's 1 TB UFS brings the ultra-high speed read/write performance, low power consumption, shortened application launch times and storage capacity demanded by 5G and other digital consumer products.

Total NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion in 3Q20, a 0.3% increase QoQ, while total NAND Flash bit shipment rose by 9% QoQ, but the ASP fell by 9% QoQ, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. The market situation in 3Q20 can be attributed to the rising demand from the consumer electronics end as well as the recovering smartphone demand before the year-end peak sales season. Notably, in the PC market, the rise of distance education contributed to the growing number and scale of Chromebook tenders, but the increase in the demand for Chromebook devices has not led to a significant increase in NAND Flash consumption because storage capacity is rather limited for this kind of notebook computer. Moreover, clients in the server and data center segments had aggressively stocked up on components and server barebones during 2Q20 due to worries about the impact of the pandemic on the supply chain. Hence, their inventories reached a fairly high level by 3Q20. Clients are now under pressure to control and reduce their inventories during this second half of the year. With them scaling back procurement, the overall NAND Flash demand has also weakened, leading to a downward turn in the contract prices of most NAND Flash products.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) today unveiled the PC OEM focused KIOXIA XG7/XG7-P Series, the company's first PCIe 4.0 client solid-state drive (SSD) series for notebooks, desktops, and workstations with qualification samples currently shipping to customers. Now spanning enterprise, data center, and client segments, KIOXIA's comprehensive PCIe 4.0 SSD portfolio addresses a wide array of applications, optimizing tomorrow's data, service and content-driven world.

Built for demanding PC environments, the XG7/XG7-P Series offers 2x the sequential read speed and approximately 1.6x the sequential write speed of the PCIe Gen3 based XG6 Series1, delivering a high performance, feature-rich storage experience for content creators, gamers and professionals. With leading capacity support up to 4096 gigabytes (GBs), the XG7-P Series SSDs enable power users to take advantage of PCIe Gen4 x4 lane bandwidth and ample storage space. Furthermore, this series deploys an all-new in-house controller vertically integrated with KIOXIA's BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, ensuring next generation feature support such as the NVMe 1.4 specification and System Management Bus (SMBus) for improved system thermal management through a sideband channel.

Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced it will begin construction of a state-of-the-art fabrication facility (Fab7) at Yokkaichi Plant in Mie Prefecture, Japan to expand production of its proprietary 3D Flash memory BiCS FLASH. The construction of Kioxia Corporation's Fab7 facility is expected to commence in the spring of 2021.

Due to technological innovation, the amount of data being generated, stored and used around the world has increased exponentially. Furthermore, the flash memory market expects further growth driven by cloud services, 5G, IoT, AI and automated driving. As a result, the production of cutting-edge products in Kioxia Corporation's Fab7 facility will continue to meet the increasing demand for memory around the world.

The Fab7 facility will be built on the north side of Yokkaichi Plant, where land development is underway. In order to secure optimal production of advanced flash memory products, the construction of Fab7 will be divided into two phases, with the first phase of construction scheduled to be completed by the spring of 2022. Kioxia plans to fund the capital investments for the construction of Fab7 from its operating cash flow.

The NAND Flash industry benefitted from strong demand for PCs and servers in 2Q20 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused a demand surge for cloud services and technologies that are related to working from home, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. This, in turn, kept demand high for SSDs. However, the smartphone and consumer electronics markets had not recovered from the impact of the pandemic. The demand for these products therefore declined compared to the previous quarter. In 2Q20, total NAND Flash bit shipment and ASP both experienced a minor increase of about 3% QoQ, while NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion, a 6.5% increase QoQ.

Kioxia Corporation has developed and started shipment of engineering samples of next generation Enterprise & Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S which is being standardized by the SNIA SFF TA Technical Work Group. E3.S is a new form factor standard for NVMe SSDs in Cloud and enterprise data centers, especially targeting PCIe 5.0 and beyond. The E3.S will contribute to the design and development of next generation systems, such as cloud, hyper-converged and general-purpose servers and All Flash Array (AFA) systems in cloud and enterprise data centers.

The E3.S specification allows for size, power and capacity options, all with a common connector. Designed for future PCIe generations that offer higher power budgets, EDSFF E3.S delivers improved performance, cooling and flexibility over other form factors. Kioxia's E3.S engineering samples, based on Kioxia's CM6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4 SSD in a 2.5-inch form factor, demonstrated approximately 35% greater performance with the same controller and BiCS FLASH 3D TLC flash memory in the EDSFF E3.S form factor with x4 lanes and 28 W (+40%) of power.

The next generation of SAS has arrived, bringing improved performance, reliability and data protection along with it. Today, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) became the first 1 company to bring 24G SAS to server and storage applications with the introduction of its 6 th generation enterprise SAS SSD family. First demonstrated at Flash Memory Summit 2019, KIOXIA's new PM6 Series of enterprise SAS SSDs is built on 24G SAS technology.

Designed for modern IT infrastructures, 24G SAS doubles the data throughput of its predecessor, while implementing new features and enhancements to reach new application performance levels. An established leader in developing SAS SSDs, KIOXIA delivers never before seen SAS SSD performance and is the only SSD supplier to offer protection and recovery from two simultaneous die failure s in an SSD. The PM6 Series builds upon this history of best in cl ass performance and reliability over six generations of SAS drives.

Further cementing its position as a leading provider of storage for next-gen mobile devices, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, today announced that it has started sampling Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices. Well suited for mobile applications requiring high-performance with low power consumption, the new lineup utilizes KIOXIA's cutting-edge BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and is supported in four capacities: 128 gigabytes (GB), 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 terabyte (TB).

The new devices integrate BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and a controller in a JEDEC-standard 11.5 x 13 mm package. The controller performs error correction, wear leveling, logical-to-physical address translation, and bad-block management for simplified system development. "KIOXIA was the first company to introduce UFS in 2013[4] and the first to offer UFS Ver. 3.0 last year and we continue to be at the forefront of UFS memory with this Ver. 3.1 announcement today," noted Scott Beekman, director of managed flash memory products for KIOXIA America, Inc. "Our newest offerings enable next-gen mobile devices to take full advantage of the connectivity benefits of 5G, leading to faster downloads and reduced lag time - and an improved user experience."

One of the big hardware industry changes of 2019 was the formal spin-off of Toshiba Memory as an entirely independent firm called Kioxia. This is big, because Toshiba is regarded as the inventor of NAND flash as we know it; and a pioneering firm with DRAM, NAND flash, and other forms of solid-state storage. Toshiba retains the hard disk business. Having formally begun operations only in Q4-2019, much of Kioxia's upcoming products are in development, but we still caught some of their latest SSDs that implement PCIe gen 4.0 and NVMe 1.4 protocol, besides some former-Toshiba products under new Kioxia branding. Kioxia is planning to make a big splash in the near future as its pioneering Twin BiCS Flash tech hits the market, besides scoring design wins with the automotive and data-center industries.

The CD6 and CM6 SSDs are star-attractions. The CD6 is designed for data-centers, and comes in capacities ranging all the way from 800 GB to 15 TB, with 1 to 3 DWPD endurance. It uses the next-generation U.3 (SFF-TA-1001) connector with PCI-Express 4.0 x4 physical-layer and NVMe 1.4 protocol. Among its security features are SIE, FIPS140-2, and SED Opal/Ruby. The drive is built in the 15 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor. The CM6 is its cousin, targeted at enterprise environments with higher mission-criticality. With capacities ranging from 800 GB to a staggering 30 TB, the drive offers sequential transfer-rates of up to 6,400 MB/s by leveraging PCI-Express 4.0 x4 and NVMe 1.4. Much like the CD6, the CM6 uses the new U.3 connector, and is built in the 15 mm form-factor. Endurance and security feature-set are identical to the CD6. We also spotted the 2+ year old rebranded XD5-series and PM5-series in fresh Kioxia colors. Lastly, there are the XG6 and XG6-P SSDs from 2019 transitioned to the Kioxia brand.

Kioxia Corporation today announced the development of the world's first three-dimensional (3D) semicircular split-gate flash memory cell structure "Twin BiCS FLASH" using specially designed semicircular Floating Gate (FG) cells. Twin BiCS FLASH achieves superior program slope and a larger program/erase window at a much smaller cell size compared to conventional circular Charge Trap (CT) cells. These attributes make this new cell design a promising candidate to surpass four bits per cell (QLC) for significantly higher memory density and fewer stacking layers. This technology was announced at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco, CA on December 11th.

3D flash memory technology has achieved high bit density with low cost per bit by increasing the number of cell stacked layers as well as by implementing multilayer stack deposition and high aspect ratio etching. In recent years, as the number of cell layers exceeds 100, managing the trade-offs among etch profile control, size uniformity and productivity is becoming increasingly challenging. To overcome this problem, Kioxia developed a new semicircular cell design by splitting the gate electrode in the conventional circular cell to reduce cell size compared to the conventional circular cell, enabling higher-density memory at a lower number of cell layers.

The next generation of automotive systems are hungry for more. More advanced infotainment and ADAS1 systems. More storage for event data recording. Support for more 3D mapping. In a move that makes more a reality, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, today announced that it has begun sampling the industry's first 512 gigabyte (GB) Automotive Universal Flash Storage (UFS) JEDEC Version 2.1 embedded memory solution. KIOXIA America's Automotive UFS supports a wide temperature range (-40°C to +105°C), meets AEC-Q100 Grade 2 requirements and offers the extended reliability required by various automotive applications. The 512 GB device joins the company's existing lineup of Automotive UFS, which includes capacities of 16 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB.

Innovations such as autonomous vehicles, more advanced infotainment systems, digital clusters, telematics, and ADAS provide not only an elevated driver experience but also a greater demand for storage within vehicles.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, today announced that its lineup of PCIe 4.0 NVMeTM enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) has achieved PCI-SIG compliance for PCIe 4.0 and University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) certification. KIOXIA's CM6 Series successfully passed interoperability tests at the August 2019 PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop - the first workshop to include official PCIe 4.0 specification tests. KIOXIA America will be on hand at Supercomputing 2019 later this month to showcase new levels of flash performance enabled by its CM6 Series SSDs.

The first company to publicly demonstrate PCIe 4.0 SSDs, KIOXIA has established itself as a leader in developing PCIe 4.0 NVM Express SSDs and continues to push the limits of flash storage performance. The CM6 Series brings planned performance improvements of 3x over its PCIe 3.0 predecessors and is 12x faster than SATA drives. KIOXIA's lineup of Gen4 PCIe SSDs also includes the CD6 Series, which is targeted to cloud and scale-out environments.

Toshiba at the Flash Memory Summit announced they've managed to develop a 5-Bit-per-Cell memory solution Based on its BiCS 4 flash memory technologies, the feat was achieved using a modified module of Quad-Level Cell (QLC) memory. This shows the technology is not only feasible, but has room for improvement, since an adapted QLC technology will always be inferior to a natively-developed, Penta-Level Cell (PLC) solution.

To achieve this ability to store one extra bit of information per cell (compared to QLC), a new level of voltage refinement is required: the cell has to be able to change its state according to one of 32 voltage states, which, in turn, have to be read out correctly by the flash memory controller. This reduces the cell's performance and endurance (as does any increase in the number of bits per cell), and will require a number of solutions to mitigate and compensate for this reduced performance. However, density has become an increasing concern from manufacturers, hence the continued development of deeper, more variable voltage states that allow for even more information to be stored in the same silicon area. Higher density means cheaper solutions, but density increased in such a way has known trade-offs that have been much talked about ever since the transition from Single-Level Cell (SLC) up to the (nowadays ubiquitous) QLC.