Total NAND Flash revenue for 1Q21 increased by 5.1% QoQ to US$14.82 billion, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, bit shipments rose by 11% QoQ, while the overall ASP dropped by 5% QoQ; hence, bit shipment growth offset the decline in the overall ASP. Although NAND Flash demand from notebook computer and smartphone manufacturers remained high, clients from the data center segment exhibited relatively weak demand, since this segment had yet to leave the state of NAND Flash oversupply. Contract prices for this quarter therefore still mostly showed a considerable QoQ drop. On the other hand, OEMs/ODMs of end products began to increase procurement of NAND Flash products from the second half of January onward because they noticed that the shortage of NAND Flash controller ICs was affecting the production of medium- and low-density storage products. Besides avoiding a possible supply crunch in the future, OEMs/ODMs were placing additional orders because they were preparing for a push to expand market share. On account of these developments, the overall NAND Flash demand surpassed expectations in 1Q21.

Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced a 20 billion yen investment to expand its Technology Development Building at its Yokohama Technology Campus and to establish its new Shin-Koyasu Advanced Research Center. The new facilities are expected to be operational by 2023 and will strengthen Kioxia's research and technology development by bringing together its R&D sites in Kanagawa Prefecture to improve efficiency and to create a more conducive working environment for innovation through collaboration.

At the Yokohama Technology Campus, the expanded Technology Development Building will nearly double the space of the current facility, allowing Kioxia to expand its product evaluation capabilities that will, in turn, increase its product quality. The expanded facility will also provide space for an increased workforce to strengthen product development in the future. The new building will also feature an environmentally friendly design with highly efficient energy-saving equipment.

KIOXIA today announced that its lineup of CM6 Series PCIe 4.0 enterprise NVMe SSDs has been successfully tested and certified to support NVIDIA's Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage. Modern AI and data science applications are synonymous with massive datasets - as are the storage requirements that go along with them. Part of the NVIDIA Magnum IO subsystem designed for GPU-accelerated compute environments, NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage allows the GPU to bypass the CPU and communicate directly with NVMe SSD storage. This improves overall system performance while reducing the impact on host CPU and memory resources. Through rigorous testing conducted by NVIDIA, KIOXIA's CM6 drives have been confirmed to meet the demanding storage requirements of GPU-intensive applications.

Large AI/ML, HPC modeling and data analytics datasets need to be moved and processed in real-time, pushing performance requirements through the roof," said Neville Ichhaporia, vice president, SSD marketing and product management for KIOXIA America, Inc. "By delivering speeds up to 16.0 gigatransfers per second throughput per lane, our CM6 Series SSDs enable NVIDIA's Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage to work with increasingly large and distributed datasets, thereby improving overall application performance and providing a path to scaling dataset sizes even further."

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.

The transition to PCIe 4.0 is in full swing, and Kioxia Corporation, a world leader in memory solutions, is leading the way forward. Today, the company announced that its lineup of KIOXIA CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVM Express (NVMe ) enterprise and data center solid state drives (SSDs) have gained compatibility approval with Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Supermicro)'s PCIe 4.0-based platforms, including a wide range of enterprise-ready rackmount systems encompassing Ultra, WIO, BigTwin, FatTwin, SuperBlade, 1U/2U NVMe all flash arrays, GPU accelerated systems and SuperWorkstations.

Users are moving to NVMe SSDs to address the demands of enterprise performance requirements, cloud-based data center architectures, and performance-centric and latency-sensitive applications. At the center of this movement is heightened demand for NVMe -based storage where PCIe 4.0 is the latest performance upgrade, and Kioxia's CM6 and CD6 Series SSDs are delivering these enhanced capabilities.

Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corp., today announced that the companies have developed their sixth-generation, 162-layer 3D flash memory technology. Marking the next milestone in the companies' 20-year joint-venture partnership, this is the companies' highest density and most advanced 3D flash memory technology to date, utilizing a wide range of technology and manufacturing innovations.

"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 percent 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."

The percentage distribution of 2021 NAND Flash bit demand by application currently shows that client SSD accounts for 31%, enterprise SSD 20%, eMMC/UFS 41%, and NAND wafer 8%, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. TrendForce expects NAND Flash ASP to undergo QoQ declines throughout 2021, since the number of NAND suppliers far exceeds DRAM suppliers, and the bit supply remains high. As Samsung, YMTC, SK Hynix, and Intel actively expand their NAND Flash bit output in 1Q21, the oversupply situation in the industry will become more severe, with a forecasted 6% QoQ increase in NAND Flash bit output and a 10-15% QoQ decline in NAND Flash ASP in 1Q21.

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.) announced another significant technological contribution to cloud data center infrastructures. Today, the company expanded its broad portfolio of client, enterprise and data center SSDs with the addition of the XD6 Series. KIOXIA's E1.S form factor XD6 SSDs are the first Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor (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.

Designed to maximize system density, efficiency and simplicity, KIOXIA's EDSFF E1.x SSDs represent the future of flash storage for servers in cloud and hyperscale data centers. As defined by the EDSFF consortium and leveraging the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the flexible, efficient, 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.

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.

Plextor late last week unveiled the M8V Plus line of mainstream SATA SSDs in the 2.5-inch and M.2-2280 form-factors. The M8V Plus is an incremental update of the original M8V series from 2018. What's new is the implementation of KIOXIA-sourced 96-layer TLC NAND flash replacing 64-layer chips from Toshiba. The M8V Plus series comes in 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB variants, while the original M8V came in 128-thru-512 GB variants.

The Silicon Motion SM2258 controller under the hood of the M8V Plus, has been updated to its latest revision, and supports Plextor-innovated Plex Compress technology. This feature uses the controller's idle time to compress files that haven't been accessed for over 30 days. The Plex Turbo feature, which is essentially variable-size SLC cache, has also been improved to be larger in size. On-paper performance hasn't changed, with the company claiming up to 560 MB/s sequential reads, up to 520 MB/s sequential writes, up to 90,000 IOPS 4K random access for the 256 GB and 512 GB variants; and up to 88,000 IOPS random access for the 1 TB variant. The company rates write endurance for the 256 GB variant at 140 TBW, 512 GB variant at 280 TBW, and 560 TBW for the 1 TB variant. All three variants are backed by 3-year warranties. The company didn't reveal pricing.

KIOXIA is readying its next-generation flagship client-segment SSD, the XG7. Some details of the drive surfaced on the UNH NVMe Integrator's List and dug out by Komachi Ensaka. We know the drive's form-factor from the fact that the company's XG6 is a client-segment drive in the M.2-2280 form-factor, which leverages PCIe Gen 3. The XG7 is described as utilizing PCIe Gen 4 and the NVMe 1.4 protocol. No other details were revealed. The drive could utilize the company's latest generation BiCS Flash memory. There's no word on date of announcement of the drive by the company.

Direct-attached performance from network-attached devices is no longer a thing of storage architects' dreams. KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), is now sampling Ethernet SSDs to select partners and customers interested in validating the benefits of Ethernet attached storage to their existing Ethernet (RoCEv2) networks. KIOXIA has been working in collaboration with key industry players Marvell, Foxconn-Ingrasys and Accton to bring groundbreaking Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) technology solutions to market - and this announcement is pivotal to that endeavor.

In an ongoing quest to contain explosive amounts of data, storage capacity and bandwidth must continue to grow while processing time must decrease. An EBOF system addresses these challenges through an Ethernet fabric that can scale flash and optimally disaggregate storage from compute. The EBOF storage solution bypasses the cost, complexity, and system limitations inherent with standard JBOF storage systems, which typically include a CPU, DRAM, HBA, and switch. This accelerates applications and workloads where disaggregated low-latency, high bandwidth, highly available storage is needed - bringing greatly improved performance and lower total cost of ownership to edge, enterprise and cloud data centers.

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, previously Toshiba Memory Holdings has recently announced plans for an initial public offering on the Tokyo stock exchange in October with a projected market capitalization of 19 billion USD. Kioxia is the world's second-largest manufacturer of NAND flash memory behind Samsung Electronics, the company has experienced heavy losses in recent years recording a loss of 1.6 billion USD in the previous financial year. The company is currently owned by Toshiba with a 40% stake with the rest being held by a consortium of US, Japanese, and South Korean investors. The funds raised will be directed towards growth investments and investor rewards.

KIOXIA America Inc, is the first supplier to launch PCIe Gen4 NVM Express (NVMe ) data center-class solid-state drives (SSDs) within the HPE NVMe mainstream performance SSD portfolio available on HPE ProLiant, HPE Synergy and HPE Apollo servers. KIOXIA offers the industry's broadest SSD product portfolio and has been collaborating with HPE to create best-in-class flash-based storage solutions for years. Today, the company announced that its CD6 Series of PCIe Gen4 NVMe U.3 SSDs now enables HPE customers to upgrade from SATA to NVMe performance at an affordable price point.

Wafer-scale design is getting popular it seems. Starting from the wafer-scale engine presented by Cerebras last year, which caused quite the shakeup in the industry, it seems that this design approach might be more useful than anyone thought. During VLSI Symposium 2020, Shigeo Oshima, Chief Engineer at Kioxia, had a presentation about new developments in SSD designs and implementations. What was one of the highlights of the presentation was the information that Kioxia is working on, was a technology Kioxia is referring to as wafer-level SSD.

The NAND chips used in SSDs would no longer be cut from the wafer and packaged separately. Instead, the wafer itself would represent the SSD. This is a similar approach Cerebras used with its wafer-scale engine AI processor. What would be gains of this approach compared to traditional methods of cutting up NAND chips and packaging them separately you might wonder? Well, for starters you wouldn't need to cut the wafer, package individual memory chips, and build the SSD out of them. Those steps could be skipped and there would be some cost savings present. And imagine if you decide to do wafer stacking. You could build super scaling SSDs with immense performance capable of millions of IOPS. However, for now, this is only a concept and it is just in early development. There is no possibility to find it in a final product anytime soon.

Kioxia Holdings Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, announced today that it expects to complete its acquisition of LITE-ON Technology Corporation's Solid State Drive (SSD) business, Solid State Storage Technology Corporation and its affiliated companies on July 1, 2020. The company entered into a share purchase agreement on August 30, 2019 in connection with the acquisition. Both parties are now following the necessary procedures in order to close the transaction on July 1, 2020.

As the demand for SSDs continues to increase with rapid expansion expected in the coming years with the rise of digital transformation, this acquisition will allow Kioxia to strengthen its SSD business significantly and help meet the projected growth in demand.

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.

This week at the HPE Discover Virtual Experience, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), will showcase the critical role its flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are playing in addressing the challenges of today - while accelerating the digital transformation of tomorrow. KIOXIA offers the industry's broadest SSD product portfolio and has been collaborating with HPE to create best-in-class storage solutions for years. KIOXIA SSDs can be found in HPE's server and storage solutions, including HPE ProLiant Servers.

At the virtual event, KIOXIA America will highlight its broad range of products that are optimizing HPE solutions. These products include a new series of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the first-ever 24G enterprise SAS SSDs built on SAS-4 technology, and a new class of SSDs that are faster and cost-effective replacements for SATA SSDs. In addition, KIOXIA America will conduct a speaking session focused on SSD trends and technology for high-performance storage solutions built for HPE ProLiant servers.

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.

According to the latest investigations by the DRAMeXchange research division of TrendForce, NAND Flash bit shipment in 1Q20 was relatively on par with 4Q19. The overall ASP of NAND Flash products also climbed during the period. As a result, the global NAND Flash revenue for the quarter went up by 8.3% QoQ to US$13.6 billion.

In 1Q20, demand for enterprise SSDs exceeded supply because cloud service providers' procurement for data centers had been growing progressively since 4Q19. Also, inventories of NAND Flash suppliers mostly returned to normal during the period. Consequently, most NAND Flash products for the major applications experienced a rise in contract prices. As for the impact of COVID-19 during the Lunar New Year, TrendForce's investigations at the time found that the server supply chain managed to make a better recovery than the supply chains for notebook computers and smartphones. The impact of the outbreak on the storage demand from the cloud services sector was thus quite limited. On the other hand, the production of notebooks and smartphones was affected by logistical problems and breakage in the component supply chain. Because of this, notebook and smartphone manufacturers have gradually resumed production since March.

From introducing game-changing new technologies to being the first to deliver PCIe 4.0 U.3 SSDs, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), continues to demonstrate its commitment to delivering cutting-edge flash solutions. This dedication will be on full display at this week's Open Compute Project (OCP) Virtual Summit and Future Technologies Symposium, where KIOXIA will showcase its data center and enterprise solid state drive (SSD) portfolio.

At the Summit, KIOXIA will highlight its CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise and data center SSDs, KumoScale storage software based on NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF ) and a new Software-Enabled Flash (SEF) technology that redefines digital storage. KIOXIA has the broadest portfolio of SSDs in the market, including SSDs for client PCs, data center, hyperscale, high-end servers and storage systems.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) today announced the introduction of Software-Enabled FlashTM (SEF), a new technology that combines software flexibility, host control and flash native semantics into a flash native API and purpose-built controller. Targeted to data center directors, architects and developers, SEF technology makes flash easier to manage, more timely to deploy and more predictable in nature - putting the power in programmers' hands.

With hyperscale computing redefining storage and virtualization, the race is on to orchestrate digital storage for cloud applications in a way that drives greater efficiency at scale. Effectively and efficiently utilizing flash for stable, predictable latency in ever-changing cloud workloads through direct host management of flash will quickly be critical to realizing these much-needed efficiencies.

Samsung Electronics is reportedly developing its 7th generation V-NAND memory with ultra-high 3D stacking technology. The first model will feature at least 160 layers, subsequent models will feature more. In early signs of the company not wanting to yield the technological initiative to China's YMTC, the first 160-layer V-NAND by Samsung is slated to come out roughly around the time YMTC's 128-layer 3D NAND flash hits mass production, towards the end of 2020.

At the heart of the ultra-high 3D stack is Samsung's proprietary Double Stack technology. The double-stack technology creates electron holes at two separate times for current to go through circuits. The current-generation single-stack chips creates these holes once throughout the stack per cycle. The 160-layer NAND flash is expected to herald a 67% increase in densities per package over the 96-layer chips in the market. Densities could also be increased by other means such as switching to newer semiconductor fabrication nodes, and PLC (5 bits per cell), which is currently being developed by KIOXIA.