The Chinese Government could retaliate to the U.S. ban on YMTC NAND flash memory products by banning American memory maker Micron Technology. This comes as the country initiated a "cybersecurity review" of Micron products to check if they conform to China's network security Laws. These are essentially the same grounds on which the US-FCC banned YMTC, forcing large customers like Apple to cancel orders of YMTC NAND flash products, derailing the company's growth. YMTC's 3D NAND flash products and their development roadmaps can be considered "contemporary," against those of Micron, Kioxia, SK hynix, and Samsung. If banned, China would force Chinese companies, such as Lenovo, HMD International, etc., to remove Micron from their qualified vendor lists.

Demonstrating continued innovation, Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corp. today announced details of their newest 3D flash memory technology. Applying advanced scaling and wafer bonding technologies, the 3D flash memory delivers exceptional capacity, performance and reliability at a compelling cost, which makes it ideal for meeting the needs of exponential data growth across a broad range of market segments.

"The new 3D flash memory demonstrates the benefits of our strong partnership with Kioxia and our combined innovation leadership," said Alper Ilkbahar, Senior Vice President of Technology & Strategy at Western Digital. "By working with one common R&D roadmap and continued investment in R&D, we have been able to productize this fundamental technology ahead of schedule and deliver high-performance, capital-efficient solutions."

Although NAND suppliers have continued to roll back production, there is still an oversupply of NAND Flash as demand for products such as servers, smartphones, and notebooks is still too weak. Therefore, TrendForce predicts that the ASP of NAND Flash will continue to fall in 2Q23, though that decline may shrink to 5~10%. The key to supply and demand returning to a market equilibrium lies in whether NAND suppliers can cut back on production even more. TrendForce believes if demand remains stable, then the ASP of NAND Flash will have an opportunity to rebound in 4Q23; if demand is weaker than expected, then ASP will take longer to recover.

Client SSD: Currently, PC OEM's have managed to liquidate most of their component inventory, and are now gearing up in preparation for mid-year sales events. Suppliers are cutting prices to clear out their inventories of PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, which are gradually being phased out. Meanwhile, prices of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs continue to face downward pressure due to a slow intake of new customer orders. The continuous decline of QLC products in 1Q23 has also dragged down the prices of TLC products, and there is relatively little room for prices to keep falling in 2Q23. While it still remains unclear whether or not demand will recover, TrendForce projects that the prices of PC client SSDs will drop 5~10% in 2Q23.

Kioxia, at the 2023 China Flash Market conference (CFM), unveiled its next-generation enterprise SSD powered by 2nd Gen XL-NAND flash memory that promises up to 13.5 GB/s of sequential reads on drives with PCIe Gen 5 x4 interfaces. This puts it higher than the 12-12.5 GB/s offered by the first crop of Gen 5 SSDs, and a 118% over its current crop of Gen 4 x4 SSDs. The drive also offers up to 9.7 GB/s of sequential writes.

4K random-access performance is of a lot more importance to enterprise customers, and here, the drive is said to offer up to 3 million IOPS random reads, with up to 1.06 million IOPS sequential writes. All this comes at a slightly reduced read-latency of 27 µs, compared to 29 µs for the previous generation. Kioxia also expects PCIe Gen 5 and CXL 1.0 to be the prominent I/O interfaces for enterprise SSDs from now until the end of 2025. It's only with 2026 that we could see the emergence of PCIe Gen 6 in the enterprise space, promising a doubling in interface bandwidth.

The homebrew and modification community has delved deeper into the recent bout of bricked Nintendo Wii U consoles, unlucky owners are seeing their systems throwing up error codes that indicate an internal memory failure. As covered on TPU almost two weeks ago, it was speculated that leaving a Wii U in a long-term state of unuse was a root cause of the problem. It is now theorized that a simple choice of memory chip is the real issue behind the corruptions, and not a case of leaving your unplugged Wii U stashed in a box somewhere.

An online database has been established on hackmd.io, and a member is collecting hard data from Wii U owners across various online communities and sources. Early indications show that consoles fitted with a Hynix eMMC are leading the pack in terms of number of system failures, Samsung-equipped models are placed in a distant second place, and the Toshiba variant is reported as having zero problems.

TrendForce's latest investigations reveal that the global NAND Flash market has been facing a demand headwind since 2H22. In response, the supply chain has been scrambling to clear out inventory, driving down NAND Flash contract prices by 20-25%. Enterprise SSD took the brunt of the fall with prices plummeting 23-28%. Despite manufacturers lowering prices in an attempt to drive up demand, clients are hesitant to purchase more components for fear of overstock. As a result, NAND Flash bit shipments rose by a mere 5.3% as ASP fell 22.8%. Global NAND Flash revenue was reported to be US$10.29 billion in 4Q22—down 25% QoQ.

TrendForce reports that Kioxia and Micron saw both a reduction in production and price in 4Q22. Kioxia's revenue plunged 30.5% due to weak demand from PC and smartphone clients and data centers readjusting their inventory. Micron generated a quarterly revenue of US$1.1 billion—a staggering 34.7% QoQ drop—that has led them to drastically decrease their capacity utilization rate for fabs. Luckily, Micron was able to ship their 232-layer client SSDs in 4Q22 as scheduled, and with the 176-layer QLC enterprise SSD hot on its heels, Micron's bit shipments are predicted to steadily improve in 2023 with their revenue climbing gradually quarter by quarter.

It has been reported by multiple users across several online communities that their Wii U consoles are no longer functioning properly. The error codes 160-0103 and 160-2155 are the dreaded indicators of memory corruption. It has been discovered that the NAND Flash within the Wii U's internal eMMC is prone to failure. According to details gleaned from teardowns of the console's hardware, Nintendo has implemented either Toshiba or Samsung flash storage boards for the various revisions of the console. There has been an uptick in the rate of bricked Wii U consoles across recent months, but the problems seem to have occurred as far back as 2015, according to archived posts on the GBA Temp forum. It is speculated that leaving the Wii U inactive for long periods of time can lead to the memory corruption issues.

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation, a global leader in designing and marketing NAND flash controllers for solid-state storage devices, today announced it will be exhibiting at the upcoming Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany from the 14th to 16th March and will be showcasing their high-performance PCIe NVMe Gen 4 single-chip SSD solution, automotive controller as well as an array of PCIe NVMe Gen 4 SSD controller solutions for personal computers, industrial/embedded and automotive applications.

Looking back at 2H22, as server OEMs slowed down the momentum of their product shipments, Chinese server buyers also held a conservative outlook on future demand and focused on inventory reduction. Thus, the flow of orders for enterprise SSDs remained sluggish. However, NAND Flash suppliers had to step up shipments of enterprise SSDs during 2H22 because the demand for storage components equipped in notebook (laptop) computers and smartphones had undergone very large downward corrections. Compared with other categories of NAND Flash products, enterprise SSDs represented the only significant source of bit consumption. Ultimately, due to the imbalance between supply and demand, the QoQ decline in prices of enterprise SSDs widened to 25% for 4Q22. This price plunge, in turn, caused the quarterly total revenue from enterprise SSDs to drop by 27.4% QoQ to around US$3.79 billion. TrendForce projects that the NAND Flash industry will again post a QoQ decline in the revenue from this product category for 1Q23.

Pure Storage, a maker of various storage solutions and custom enterprise-grade SSDs, claims the company will produce SSDs with up to 300 TBs of capacity by 2026. In an interview with Pure Storage CTO Alex McMullan, Blocks & Files got exclusive information that the company targets SSD capacities of up to 300 TBs in 2026. Pure Storage creates proprietary Direct Flash Modules (DFM) SSDs which use 3D NAND chips controlled by a custom SSD controller, are used in the FlashArray systems, and run on a custom FlashBlade operating system. This level of customization allows Pure Storage to create SSD drives with remarkable capacities in the future as the 3D NAND technology advances.

In the coming years, 3D NAND flash manufacturers will switch from the current 200-layer chips to the 400/500-layer chips, driving storage density to new highs. As manufacturers update their technology, so does Pure with its DFM cards that use regular U.2 NVMe connectors in a custom ruler-style format made explicitly for Pure FlashArray systems. Compared to upcoming HDDs that Toshiba and Seagate will use, Pure Storage DFM SSDs will have much higher capacities and read/write speeds, especially as higher-density 3D NAND arrives. You can see the comparison of Pure's estimates for the future 300 TB SSDs with future HDD technology.

Today, KIOXIA America, Inc. announces its proud participation in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2) program. As part of the program, KIOXIA SSDs provide robust flash storage in HPE Edgeline and HPE ProLiant servers in a test environment to conduct scientific experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

"By bringing KIOXIA's expertise and its SSDs, one of the industry's leading NAND flash capabilities, with HPE Spaceborne Computer-2, together we are pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery and innovation at the most extreme edge."

Since 2022, DRAM suppliers have been adjusting their product mixes so as to assign more wafer input to server DRAM products while scaling back the wafer input for mobile DRAM products. This trend is driven by two reasons. First, the demand outlook is bright for the server DRAM segment. Second, the mobile DRAM segment was in significant oversupply during 2022. Moving into 2023, the projections on the growth of smartphone shipments and the increase in the average DRAM content of smartphones remain quite conservative. Therefore, DRAM suppliers intend to keep expanding the share of server DRAM in their product mixes. According to TrendForce's analysis on the distribution of the DRAM industry's total bit output for 2023, server DRAM is estimated to comprise around 37.6%, whereas mobile DRAM is estimated to comprise around 36.8%. Hence, server DRAM will formally surpass mobile DRAM in terms of the portion of the overall supply within this year.

One of the major issues with M.2 based NVMe SSDs today is the excessive heat they output, part of the reason most of them run so hot is because of the older fabrication node they're made on. Most current PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD controllers are built on a 12 nm node of some kind, but based on data out of IT Home in the PRC, we now have details of Silicon Motion's SM2504XT PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD controller, which appears to be one of the first, if not the first, to be made on a 7 nm node.

Although it's not mentioned specifically who Silicon Motion's manufacturing partner is, it's most likely going to be TSMC, as Silicon Motion is a Taiwanese company. The SM2504XT will be a mainstream 4-channel controller, but it'll support NAND flash rated at up to 3600 MT/s, which is a step up from any other currently announced NVMe SSD controller. It also supports the NVMe 2.0 protocol and will have a PCIe 5.0 x4 host system interface. The new controller is expected to have hit the engineering sample stage some time in September this year.

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation ("Silicon Motion" or the "Company") today announced its financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2022. For the fourth quarter of 2022, net sales (GAAP) decreased sequentially to $200.8 million from $250.8 million in the third quarter of 2022. Net income (GAAP) decreased to $23.5 million, or $0.71 per diluted American Depositary Share ("ADS") (GAAP), from net income (GAAP) of $42.9 million, or $1.29 per diluted ADS (GAAP), in the third quarter of 2022.

For the fourth quarter of 2022, net income (non-GAAP) decreased to $41.1 million, or $1.22 per diluted ADS (non-GAAP), from net income (non-GAAP) of $51.2 million, or $1.53 per diluted ADS (non-GAAP), in the third quarter of 2022.

In Japan, the first consumer focused PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs have gone on sale and one of these drives has been put through some quick synthetic benchmarks by @momomo_us on Twitter. We're not familiar with the CFD Gaming brand which the drive is sold under, but the CSSD-M2M2TPG5NFZ—as the drive is called—is based on Phison's E26 controller and it's paired with Micron's B58R 3D TLC NAND, suggesting it's based around a reference design from Phison. CFD Gaming offers the drive in 1, 2 and 4 TB sizes and @momomo_us tested the 2 TB version.

Before we go into the performance figures, there's one thing that needs to be highlighted about this drive, it produces a high pitch noise during use, thanks to its tiny 17x17 mm, 21,000 rpm fan from Sunon. @momomo_us provided a video on Twitter which is linked below, so you can hear it in action for yourself. Hopefully this isn't the future of NVMe SSDs, as it's going to put off many potential customers from getting one. @momomo_us only tested the drive with CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4, which shows that sequential write speeds are slightly faster than claimed by CFD Gaming, with the sequential write speeds being bang on the money. For those hoping for higher random performance, things aren't looking so great, as the drive only performs slightly better than the best PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives.

Samsung Electronics today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year 2022. The Company posted KRW 70.46 trillion in consolidated revenue and KRW 4.31 trillion in operating profit in the quarter ended December 31, 2022. For the full year, it reported 302.23 trillion in annual revenue, a record high and KRW 43.38 trillion in operating profit.

The business environment deteriorated significantly in the fourth quarter due to weak demand amid a global economic slowdown. Earnings at the Memory Business decreased sharply as prices fell and customers continued to adjust inventory. The System LSI Business also saw a decline in earnings as sales of key products were weighed down by inventory adjustments in the industry. The Foundry Business posted a new record for quarterly revenue while profit increased year-on-year on the back of advanced node capacity expansion as well as customer base and application area diversification.

Western Digital has launched its first dual actuator hard drive, in the shape of the Ultrastar DC HS760 Hard Drive, which is currently only available in a single 20 TB SKU. This places WD's new drive head to head with Seagates Exos X20 drives, although Seagate offers an 18 and a 20 TB SKU. WD offers the Ultrastar DC HS760 with a SAS interface, whereas Seagate offers its Exos drives with either SATA or SAS connectivity. Both companies are using traditional CMR platters that spin at 7,200 RPM.

WD didn't provide too many details when it comes to the performance of the Ultrastar DC HS760, as the company only claims it offers twice the sequential throughput and 1.7 times higher random performance compared with the Ultrastar DC HC560. WD appears to have a potential performance advantage over Seagate, as WD has integrated its OptiNAND technology based on WD's iNAND, which means that the Ultrastar DC HS760 should have at least twice as much cache as Seagates Exos X20 drives which top out at 256 MB. This is based on WD's DC HC560 drives which ship with 512 MB of cache. Just like Seagates Exos drives, the Ultrastar DC HS760 is a helium filled drive and WD claims 2.5 million MTBF time and offers a five year warranty. No pricing was revealed.

Corsair has teased its fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD yet in an M.2 form factor. The company published some initial details about its upcoming product in a short video. However, the video has been taken private, indicating that the launch date may be at a later stage of the year. Thanks to Overclock3D, we saw its looks and got a slight peek at the product. Called the MP700, the SSD is supposedly boasting a fantastic 10 GB/s read capability. The write section is also impressive, with the NVMe SSD capable of reaching around 9 GB/s of what we suppose is a sustained write speed. It uses 3D TLC NAND Flash and supports Microsoft DirectStorage technology for faster load time. Below is a quote from Corsair about the MP700.

CorsairExperience the performance of PCIe Gen5 storage in your system, with up to 10,000MB/sec sequential read and 9,500MB/sec sequential write speeds for amazingly fast save, boot, and load times.
The high-bandwidth NVMe 2.0 interface and high-density 3D TLC NAND flash memory offer outstanding performance and longevity. Slot the MP700 directly into your motherboard thanks to its M.2 2280 form-factor, while a stylish aluminum heatsink helps manage temperatures and reduce throttling. Microsoft DirectStorage enables unprecedented load times when playing compatible games.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Western Digital and Kioxia are holding new talks about a potential merger of both companies' flash production businesses. The merger appears to be quite complex, as not only does it involve Western Digital spinning off its flash production business unit, which is then said to be merged with Kioxia, into what will be a publicly traded company in the US, but there will also be a second listing in Japan for the company.

Considering that Kioxia came out of Toshiba's DRAM and NAND flash manufacturing business, in which Western Digital was a partner until Toshiba divested its business into Kioxia. This caused quite some tension between the two companies, but Western Digital and Kioxia kept producing NAND flash in the shared facilities. The report by Bloomberg suggests that a management team from Western Digital will be running the combined company, which could potentially lead to future issues between the US and Japanese sides of the company. Time will tell if a merger will actually take place or not, as the two companies failed to come to an agreement in 2021, but it's possible that something has changed since then. Back in 2021, the merger was valued at US$20 billion plus.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions today announced the evolutionary AORUS Gen4 7300 SSD, which is the upgraded PCIe 4.0 SSD with read speed up to 7300 MB/s. Enhanced by the select PCIe 4.0 controller with advanced 3D-TLC NAND Flash, it provides superior performance than the previous generation PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. AORUS Gen4 7300 SSD with M.2 2280 interface comes in two capacity variants of 2 TB and 1 TB, along with a unique packaging design of separated SSD and heatsink packing to offer more flexible thermal solutions. Meanwhile, the GIGABYTE exclusive GCC software management platform provides the instant overview and adjustment of SSD status for a cool storage operation with high performance.

AORUS Gen4 7300 SSD equips the select Phison E18 8-channel controller, which provides users with ultimate random access rate, as well as the high-speed 3D-TLC NAND Flash and SLC cache design that brings the PCIe 4.0 into full play. Under the real test, AORUS Gen4 7300 SSD can reach a read speed up to 7300 MB/s and a write speed up to 6850 MB/s, which is faster than the previous gen. PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, two times faster than PCIe 3.0 SSD, and up to 13 times faster than SATA SSD. Enhanced by the multi-core architecture of the E18 controller, AORUS Gen4 7300 SSD not only improves AI multitasking to lessen the bottleneck of system performance, but powers up content creators, gamers, and users eager for extreme performance.

Consumer electronics giant Samsung had what can only be described as a terrible fourth quarter in 2022, with profits falling by around 4.3 trillion Korean Won, or US$3.4 billion, a drop of 69 percent compared to the previous year. This will be Samsung's lowest profit since Q3 2014 and Samsung has grown a lot as a company in those eight years. The revenue was also down nine percent from the third quarter of 2022, suggesting that Samsung is in for a rough start to the new year.

There seems to be a combination of reasons for the drop in profit, from lower demand for Samsung's range of smartphones and other consumer electronics, but also due to lower demand for memory chips, both DRAM and NAND, both of which Samsung is a big producer of. Samsung stated that "for the memory business, the decline in fourth-quarter demand was greater than expected as customers adjusted inventories in their effort to further tighten finances," which places Samsung in the same situation as its major competitors, who have also reported huge demand slumps.

KIOXIA is betting big on enterprise flash storage, and demoed several of its new and already-launched NVMe products based on the company's 162-layer 3D NAND flash memory, aka 6th Generation BiCS flash. Starting off, we see several single-chip solutions, namely the BiCS5 eTLC, the BiCS Industial TLC, and the BiCS5-QLC. These are complete NVMe SSDs on a single package, targeting embedded systems, industrial PCs, and the likes. They can even be directly embedded on server motherboards to serve as boot drives, freeing up precious chassis space for the main storage devices.

The EM6 is an enterprise network-attached SSD in a 2.5-inch form-factor. This is a NAS-on-a-stick that can be deployed at large scale, and accessible as a network resource, or as an NVMe-over-Fiber device. The CM7 is a high-capacity 2.5-inch (EDSFF E3.S) SSD that comes in sizes of up to 30 TB, and has PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface with NVMe 2.0 protocol, with endurance of up to 3 DWPD and offering FIPS 140-33 security. We also see the XD6 line of EDSFF E1.S form-factor NVMe SSDs with PCIe 4.0 interfaces, up to 3.84 TB capacity, and 1 DWPD endurance.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, today is demonstrating the company's latest PCIe Gen5 innovation that is transcending system-level performance to new heights at CES in Las Vegas. Phison is demonstrating the E26 with Phison's proprietary I/O+ Technology to usher a new evolution of gaming experiences. For enterprise, Phison is previewing the company's latest Gen5 X Series SSD enterprise controllers, which can provide twice the performance per watt (in comparison to X1, the previous generation). Following the success of the world's first PCI-SIG Association certified PCIe 5.0 Redriver PS7101, Phison is also introducing the PS7201 Retimer with industry-proven IP. Phison's Retimer is designed to solve performance and data integrity issues in enterprise and automotive applications and further enhances the Gen5 ecosystem.

"Phison is ecstatic to be ringing in the new year by showcasing our product milestones for the industry, our partners and enterprise customers because we are committed and dedicated to engineering next generation technologies through ecosystem excellence," said Michael Wu, GM & President of Phison Technology Inc. (USA). "As a proven category leader, Phison's E26 with I/O+ Technology, latest Enterprise PCIe Gen5 X Series, signal enhancing Redriver and Retimer are product breakthroughs that are a testament to our engineering success."

According to Reuters, Samsung is gearing up to increase the chip production capacity at its P3 factory in Pyeongtaek in South Korea, despite the fact that there's a general slowdown in the semiconductor industry, in addition to the general economic downturn. Samsung is apparently planning on adding 12-inch wafer capacity for DRAM, while also adding more 4 nm chip capacity. The P3 fab kicked off production of Samsung's most cutting-edge NAND flash chips earlier this year and is the company's largest fab overall. According to Reuters, Samsung is aiming to add at least 10 new EUV machines in 2023.

In related news via The Elec, Samsung has seen costs increase significantly when it comes to materials costs relating to the expansion of the P3 fab. So far, the company has racked up extra costs of over a trillion korean Won, or more than US$786 million, largely due to all of its contractors having raised their prices. The report also mentioned that some parts of the expansion of the P3 fab has been delayed by as much as a year, which isn't good news for Samsung and it likely means that the company will see further increases in costs before the expansions are finished.

SK hynix Inc. announced today that it will showcase a number of its core and brand-new products at the CES 2023, the most influential tech event in the world taking place in Las Vegas from Jan. 5th through Jan. 8th. The products, introduced under the theme of the "Green Digital Solution," as part of the SK Group's "Carbon-Free Future" campaign, are expected to attract Big Tech customers and experts given the significant improvement in performance and energy efficiency compared with the previous generation as well as the effect of lessening the impact on the environment.

Attention on energy-efficient memory chips has been on the rise as global tech companies pursue products that process data faster, while consuming less energy. SK hynix is confident that its products to be displayed at the CES 2023 will meet customers' such needs with outstanding performance per watt and performance. The core product put forward at the show is PS1010 E3.S, an eSSD product composed of multiple 176-layer 4D NAND that supports the fifth generation of the PCIe interface.