TrendForce reports that the recent easing of tight supply for components has led to rising shipments for enterprise servers. Furthermore, ODMs for the most part have been able to sustain the momentum of data center build-out with the demand from ByteDance and the tenders issued by Chinese telecom companies. Nevertheless, the performance of the enterprise SSD market on the whole has been impacted by falling NAND Flash prices. For 3Q22, the NAND Flash industry's enterprise SSD revenue dropped by 28.7% QoQ to US$5.22 billion. Furthermore, all enterprise SSD suppliers recorded a negative performance for the period as well.

Regarding individual enterprise SSD suppliers' revenue figures for 3Q22, Samsung posted around US$2.12 billion. Its market share also shrank to 40.6% from 44.5% in 2Q22. Samsung's performance was mainly dragged down by the decline in its NAND Flash ASP. In the aspect of product development, SSDs featuring 128L NAND Flash and PCIe 4.0 will remain Samsung's main offerings for enterprise storage during 2023.

Market intelligence firm TrendForce reports that the whole NAND Flash market was severely weakened by plummeting demand in 3Q22. Because shipments of end products including consumer electronics and servers had been below expectations, the overall NAND ASP fell by 18.3% QoQ. Furthermore, the general economic outlook remained pessimistic, so enterprises across many sectors started to scale back their capital expenditure plans and halted the momentum of their procurement activities. Due to this development, the problem of excess inventory eventually spread to NAND Flash suppliers. The pressure on suppliers to make sales was ratcheted up dramatically. According to TrendForce's investigation, NAND Flash bit shipments fell by 6.7% QoQ for 3Q22, and the overall NAND Flash ASP also kept sliding. On account of the unfavorable market situation, the NAND Flash industry recorded a total revenue of around US$13.71 billion for 3Q22. The QoQ revenue decline reached as much as 24.3%.

The ranking of NAND Flash suppliers by revenue saw two notable changes for 3Q22. First, SK Group moved down to third place as it suffered the largest revenue drop among suppliers. Its revenue slipped by 29.8% QoQ to US$2.54 billion mainly due to the significant deterioration of the demand for PCs and smartphones. Its subsidiary Solidigm was also affected by the slowdown in server procurements. Previously, servers had a fairly stable demand situation compared with other kinds of end products. However, server demand eventually buckled in 3Q22 as result of enterprises cutting capital expenditure and undergoing a period of inventory correction. Compared with 2Q22, SK Group (that encompasses SK hynix and Solidigm) posted a drop of 11.1% in bit shipments and an even steeper decline of more than 20% in ASP.

Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, has developed an image classification system based on Memory-Centric AI, an AI technology that utilizes high-capacity storage. The system classifies images using a neural network that refers to knowledge stored in external high-capacity storage; this avoids "catastrophic forgetting," one of the major challenges of neural networks, and allows knowledge to be added or updated without the loss of current knowledge. This technology was presented on October 25 at the oral session of European Conference on Computer Vision 2022 (ECCV 2022) in Tel Aviv, one of the top conferences in the field of computer vision.

In conventional AI techniques, neural networks are trained to acquire knowledge by updating parameters called "weights." Once fully trained, in order to acquire new knowledge a neural network must be either re-trained from the beginning or fine-tuned with new data. The former requires huge amounts of time and consumes significant energy costs, while the latter requires parameters to be updated and faces the catastrophic forgetting problem of losing the knowledge acquired in the past which leads to deterioration of classification accuracy.

Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corporation today celebrated the opening of the state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication facility, Fab7, at the Yokkaichi Plant in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Production capacity at Fab7 will ramp up in stages over time, in line with market trends. Total investment in phase one of Fab7 is expected to be approximately one trillion yen. Part of the capital investment in phase one of the Fab7 facility will be funded by a government subsidy that promotes cutting-edge semiconductor production facilities and ensures the stable production of semiconductors in Japan.

Fab7 has the capability to produce sixth-generation, 162-layer flash memory and future advanced 3D flash memory, is scheduled to start shipping 162-layer flash memory in early 2023. The facility uses artificial intelligence for enhanced production efficiencies and employs a space-efficient facility design that enlarges the space available for manufacturing equipment in its clean rooms. Fab7 is built for safety and sustainability, capable of absorbing earthquake shocks and implements the latest energy-saving manufacturing equipment.

Affected by tight wafer supply, lead time for SSD controller IC and PMIC components was prolonged to 32 weeks in 2021. All controller IC suppliers generally give priority to supplying NAND Flash manufacturers, so production at module factories could not meet SSD demand in the retail market during that time. In 2H21, the supply of SSD-related components improved quarter by quarter and various module manufacturers boosted their SSD shipments in order to upsurge their annual performance. According to TrendForce research, SSD shipments through global distribution channels reached 127 million units in 2021, with an annual growth rate of 11%.

This global SSD ranking is based on the shipment volume of module houses' own in-house brands in the distribution channel market as a standard for calculation and NAND Flash manufacturers are not included. NAND Flash manufacturer supply accounts for approximately 42% of the overall distribution channel market while module factory shipments account for approximately 58%. When SSD-related components were hard to come by, NAND manufacturers' supply chain management occupied a superior position compared to module houses, so NAND manufacturers' market share in the overall distribution channel market increased compared with 2020.

According to a TrendForce investigations, memory pricing began to decline from 4Q21 due to weakening demand for certain consumer electronics. Coupled with the impact of rising inflation, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and pandemic policies, demand in peak season was weak, resulting in inventory pressure that has extended from the buyer side to manufacturers. In response to the aforementioned situation, Micron announced last week that it would cut production of DRAM and NAND Flash, becoming the first major memory manufacturer to officially reduce its capacity utilization plan. In terms of NAND Flash, the market situation is more severe than that of DRAM. As the average contract price of mainstream capacity wafers has fallen to their cash cost and is approaching the periphery of selling at a loss for various manufacturers, Kioxia also announced that it will reduce NAND Flash capacity utilization by 30% from October on the heels of Micron's announcement.

In terms of DRAM, current contract pricing remains higher than the total production cost of various mainstream suppliers. Therefore, compared with NAND Flash, it remains to be seen whether there will be a significant reduction in production. In addition to mentioning the slight reduction in capacity utilization in this sector currently, Micron mainly emphasized its sharp downward revision of capital expenditures in 2023 and that the annual growth of DRAM production bits next year will only be around 5%. TrendForce believes, according to Micron, to actualize such conservative bit growth means that there is still room for a significant downward revision in capacity utilization and the extent to which Micron's subsequent production reductions are implemented remains to be seen.

The economic downturn keeps pushing the PC and related manufacturing markets down, following slumps in demand stemming from increased cost of living, the veritable arms race to technological products during COVID-19, and manufacturer's efforts to increase output to provide enough product to meet said demand. But all that goes up must eventually come down, and now South Korean manufacturers are facing the result of months of decreased consumption, with stock levels increasing ahead of actual product uptake (stocks have reached 67.3% of produced goods and factory shipments have declined 20.4%). This has now led to a 1.7% decline in August's output when compared to the same period last year - the first time the South Korean industry has seen negative growth since 2018.

Samsung and Kioxia both have announced a reduction in production output in the months to come, which should give distribution enough time to clear some of the accumulated inventory. The scales of production typically occur in cycles - ones with excess manufacturing against demand, and other times where the reverse happens. It seems we're now in the descending part of the spectrum, with prices - especially of NAND - being expected to drop in the coming months. It will take a while until the manufacturing reduction makes itself felt in the overall IC pricing landscape. Micron too has announced it's slowing down the production ramp-up of its 232-layer 3D NAND so as not to contribute in excess towards an already over-saturated market.

Kioxia Corporation, a world leader in memory solutions, today announced the industry's first 2 terabyte (TB) microSDXC memory card working prototypes. Using its innovative BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and an in-house designed controller, basic functions of the KIOXIA 2 TB microSDXC UHS-I memory card working prototypes were confirmed in the microSDXC standard's maximum density.

As the data recording capacity of smartphones, action cameras, and portable game consoles continues to increase, the need for ultra-high capacity SD memory cards to store all of this data has never been higher. The SD Association's SDXC specification has supported memory cards up to 2 TB for more than a decade—but 2 TB cards have not been successfully manufactured until now.

KIOXIA America, Inc. is at Intel Innovation this week to demonstrate its CM7 Series NVMe SSDs that deliver next-generation levels of performance to enterprise and data center workloads. The KIOXIA CM7 family is designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.51-inch form factors. These drives double performance from the prior generation and offer an expanded set of form factor options, larger capacities, and advanced features.

Intel Innovation is a technology showcase event that spotlights the tools, training and community created to empower developers to create what's next. CM7 demos will be conducted in the KIOXIA kiosk located in Intel Innovation's PCIe 5.0 and CXL Ecosystems Zone on the show floor of San Jose's McEnery Convention Center. KIOXIA will present a video showing its PCIe 5.0 drives demonstrating high performance, low latency and high bandwidth, in a 12th Gen Intel Core processor-based workstation. CM7 performance of up to 14 gigabytes per second sequential read throughput, utilizing the full bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 x4 speed, will be shown.

KIOXIA America, Inc. has introduced new Industrial Grade flash memory devices. This new lineup utilizes the latest generation KIOXIA BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory with 3-bit-per-cell (triple-level cell, TLC) technology, and is available in a 132-BGA package. Densities range from 512 gigabits (64 gigabytes) to 4 terabits (512 gigabytes) to support the unique requirements of industrial applications - including telecommunication, networking, embedded computing and much more.

The storage requirements for many industrial applications stand in stark contrast to those of SSDs designed to be housed in climate-controlled data centers - including the need for extended temperature ranges and the ability to maintain high reliability and performance in rugged operating conditions. Designed with these needs in mind, the new KIOXIA devices support a wide temperature range (-40°C to +85°C) and offer suitable products for the industrial market.

Here are some of the first pictures of the GoodRAM IRDM Ultimate PCIe Gen 5 M.2 NVMe SSD. Built in the M.2-2580 form-factor, the drive combines Phison's upcoming E26 controller, with what's likely KIOXIA 162-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory. The controller takes advantage of the PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface, and NVMe 2.0 protocol, offering sequential transfer speeds of around 10 GB/s reads, with around 9.5 GB/s writes. The drive comes in capacities of 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB. It comes with a fairly large heatsink included. AMD Socket AM5 will be the first platform to feature CPU-attached PCIe Gen 5 M.2 slots, which goes on sale by late-September. The first PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs, according to AMD, should be here by November.

As reported by BusinessKorea, Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, will source its 3D NAND from Chinese memory maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC). Known for supplying 3D NAND to Chinese SSD makers, YTMC's reported contract with Apple will fuel the upcoming iPhone 14 SKU manufacturing. Whether or not this partnership will expand to other products, it is essential to have as many storage sources as possible, as Apple sells millions of devices per year. YTMC is on track to deliver 3D NAND flash with the latest Xstacking 3.0 six-plane architecture that provides triple-level cell storage with I/O speeds of 2400 MT/s.

YTMC has joined the list of 3D NAND flash vendors that Apple works with, including SK Hynix, Samsung, Kioxia, and possibly others. This partnership also highlights that the Chinese memory output is sufficient and significant enough to break into more markets worldwide, not remaining exclusive to domestic use.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that it has begun sampling the latest generation of its JEDEC e-MMC Ver. 5.1-compliant embedded flash memory products for consumer applications. The new products are available in capacities of 64 and 128 gigabytes (GB) and integrate the company's BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and a controller in a single package.

Demand for mid-range capacities in consumer products such as tablets and IoT devices continues to grow, and though the market continues to shift to UFS, there are cases where e-MMC may still be used. The new KIOXIA e-MMC devices expand the available options. A leading provider of flash memory and storage for consumer applications and mobile devices, KIOXIA has been supporting e-MMC since 2007 and was the first supplier to introduce the higher performance follow-on solution to e-MMC, UFS, in early 2013. Today, the broad KIOXIA lineup of e-MMC and UFS solutions provides support across a wide range of densities (4 GB-1 TB).

According to TrendForce research, material supply improvement and spiking demand for enterprise SSDs from North American hyperscale data center and enterprise clients in 2Q22 coupled with the Kioxia contamination incident in 1Q22 prompted customers to ramp up procurement to avoid future supply shortages. Manufacturers also give priority to meeting the needs of server customers due to the high pricing of enterprise SSD. In the second quarter, overall revenue of the enterprise SSD market increased by 31.3% to US$7.32 billion.

As the market leader, Samsung has grown its enterprise SSD revenue to US$3.26 billion with the recovery of enterprise SSD procurement. Especially in the second quarter, when orders for other consumer products continued to decline, enterprise SSD became the company's outlet for reducing production capacity. At present, Samsung has been continuously investing in the development of next-generation transmission specification products such as the CXL 2.0 product released at the Flash Summit in early August, in order to maintain a leading position in the market.

Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced the launch of the second generation of XL-FLASH, a Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution based on its BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology, which significantly reduces bit cost while providing high performance and low latency. Product sample shipments are scheduled to start in November this year, with volume production expected to begin in 2023.

The second generation XL-FLASH achieves significant reduction in bit cost as a result of the addition of new multi-level cell (MLC) functionality with 2-bit per cell, in addition to the single-level cell (SLC) of the existing model. The maximum number of planes that can operate simultaneously has also increased from the current model, which will allow for improved throughput. The new XL-FLASH will have a memory capacity of 256 gigabits.

This week at the Flash Memory Summit Conference & Expo, KIOXIA America, Inc.—along with the entire industry - will celebrate an important milestone: the 35th anniversary of its invention of NAND flash memory. While looking back at the transformative technology it invented back in 1987, KIOXIA also has its eyes on the future, defining what's next for flash by introducing innovative new products, form factors, and solutions. At FMS, the company will highlight how it is using flash memory to drive advancements and improvements in a wide variety of applications, including mobile computing, the edge, the cloud, data centers and automotive.

KIOXIA's Scott Nelson, executive vice president and chief marketing officer and Shigeo (Jeff) Ohshima, technology executive, SSD Application Engineering will jointly present a keynote session titled: "KIOXIA: 35 Years of Flash & Beyond." The session will highlight the 35th Anniversary of the invention of flash memory and will look forward to how KIOXIA is driving the future of this game-changing technology.

Supporting the Linux Foundation's Software-Enabled Flash open-source project, KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced innovative new software-defined technology and sample hardware based on PCIe and NVMe technology. This technology fully uncouples flash storage from legacy HDD protocols, allowing flash to realize its full capability and potential as a storage media. KIOXIA will highlight Software-Enabled Flash at this week's Flash Memory Summit Conference & Expo at its booth #307 on the show floor and present the session, "NVMe Software-Enabled Flash Storage for Hyperscale Data Centers," at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

o reach efficiency at scale, hyperscale cloud storage needs more from flash storage devices that are currently based on hard disk drive protocols created decades ago. To resolve this, the Linux Foundation's Software-Enabled Flash Community Project will enable industry adoption of a software-defined flash API, giving developers the ability to customize flash storage specific to data center, application and workload requirements. The project was created to benefit the storage developer community with a vendor agnostic, flexible solution that meets the evolving requirements of the modern data center.

Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corporation announced today that their joint venture Fab 7 manufacturing facility at Yokkaichi Plant has been approved to receive up to 92.9 billion yen subsidy from the Japanese government. The subsidy will be granted under a designated government program aimed at facilitating corporate investment in cutting-edge semiconductor production facilities and securing stable production of semiconductors in Japan.

Leveraging their 20-year joint venture partnership, Kioxia and Western Digital will continue to accelerate the development and production of cutting-edge flash memory at the Yokkaichi Plant, the largest semiconductor plant in Japan. In addition, the two companies will contribute to the development of semiconductor-related industries and talent.

Kioxia Corporation today announced that it has collaborated with Aerospike to enhance Aerospike Server Community Edition database - resulting in a 36 % increase in application performance compared with the original software without the enhancement by Kioxia. Testing was performed with KIOXIA FL6 Series enterprise NVMe Storage Class Memory (SCM) SSDs with a software enhancement developed by Kioxia.

The Aerospike database is optimized to run on flash memory and SSD devices and is capable of providing high throughput and low latency on flash memory. Featuring Kioxia's SCM solution, XL-FLASH, the PCIe 4.0 and NVMe 1.4 -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. Currently, in mass production, dual-port KIOXIA FL6 Series drives deliver high endurance (60 DWPD) and are available in capacities up to 3,200 GB.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that its CM7 Series enterprise NVMe SSDs are now shipping to select customers. Optimized for the needs of high-performance, highly efficient servers and storage, the CM7 family is designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.5-inch form factors

Having introduced the industry's first EDSFF drives designed with PCIe 5.0 technology last year, the addition of the CM7 family expands KIOXIA's leadership position and allows OEM customers to deliver best-in-class performance to end users: The CM7 Series nearly saturates the PCIe 5.0 interface at 14 gigabytes/s read throughput.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the addition of a high-capacity 512 gigabyte (GB) product to its lineup of EXCERIA HIGH ENDURANCE microSD memory cards. The new 512 GB product delivers sufficient performance and endurance in continuous high-resolution 4K video recordings of dashboard and surveillance cameras.

As the evolution of dashboard cameras continues, with new features such as high-resolution recordings, multiple cameras and parking surveillance being added, the amount of recorded data is steadily increasing. The new KIOXIA 512 GB EXCERIA HIGH ENDURANCE microSDXC UHS-I memory card is designed for the extended recording time required by dashboard cameras, and is capable of up to 17,000 hours of cumulative use and up to 10 hours and 29 minutes of continuous 4K video (3840x2160 pixels, 100 megabits per second) recording. With a read speed of up to 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speed of up to 85 MB/s, the new 512 GB card supports the UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) and Video Speed Class 30 (V30) specifications, making it suitable for 4K video recording.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced sampling of the industry's first XFM DEVICE Ver. 1.0-compliant removable PCIe standard attached, NVMe storage device: the XFMEXPRESS XT2. With a new form factor and connector, the XFM DEVICE Ver. 1.0 standard delivers an unparalleled combination of features designed to revolutionize ultra-mobile PCs, IoT devices and a variety of 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 XT2 is a new form factor for PCIe/NVMe specification devices. Featuring a powerful combination of small size, speed and serviceability, XFMEXPRESS technology was developed to enhance next-generation mobile and embedded applications. The XFMEXPRESS XT2 from KIOXIA is the first product to meet the specification of the new JEDEC standard.

Kioxia Holdings Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, announced today that it completed the acquisition of Chubu Toshiba Engineering Corporation. The company entered into a share purchase agreement with Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation) on February 24, 2022, in connection with the acquisition to further strengthen Kioxia Group's technology development capabilities.

This acquisition brings in-house a highly experienced engineering team while also enabling cost efficiencies, which together will improve the enterprise value of the company. The acquisition will enhance Kioxia's technology development capabilities, as well as deliver synergies across the design, operation and production of its manufacturing plants.

According to TrendForce research, North American data centers saw an improvement in components supply after February, driving a recovery in purchase order volume. As Server brands returned to normal in-office work following the pandemic, the increase in capital expenditures on related information equipment has also boosted order growth. The addition of Kioxia's raw material contamination incident led to an increase in the pricing of certain rush orders, pushing up overall Enterprise SSD revenue in 1Q22 to US$5.58 billion, or 14.1% growth QoQ.

According to TrendForce, Samsung and SK hynix (including Solidigm) were the top two players in 1Q22. At the beginning of the year, demand from hyperscale data centers resulted in high inventory levels due to component mismatches, leading Samsung's order growth missing expectations. However, as repercussions from the WDC and Kioxia contamination incident hit NAND Flash production capacity in 1Q22, server customers quickly turned to Samsung for additional orders, driving the company's 1Q22 revenue to US$2.77 billion, up 14.8% QoQ.

According to TrendForce research, as manufacturers actively shifted production capacity to 128 layer products, the market turned to oversupply, resulting in a drop in contract prices in 1Q22, among which the decline in consumer-grade products was more pronounced. Although enterprise SSD purchase order volume has grown, demand for smart phone bits has weakened due to the Russian-Ukrainian war, the traditional off-season, and rising inflation. Client inventories have increased significantly, so it remains challenging for overall bit shipment volume to offset potential decline. In 1Q22, NAND Flash bit shipments and average selling prices fell by 0.5% and 2.3%, respectively, resulting in a 3.0% quarterly decrease in overall industry revenue to US$17.92 billion.

Although China's smartphone stocking momentum was marginally weak considering the off-season, due to sluggish supply on the part of Kioxia and WDC, Samsung's 1Q22 client SSD shipment bit growth was driven up by an influx of rush orders and North American enterprise SSD client orders also recovered significantly in March. Overall bit shipments increased by 9% QoQ and ASP decreased by 2% QoQ. In 1Q22, the NAND Flash portion of Samsung's electronics business posted revenue of US$6.32 billion, up 3.4% QoQ.