Solid State Storage and Memory at CES 2025

Digital memory and storage power all of our consumer devices and applications, whether running on a local device or from the cloud. My next blogs will look at various digital storage products and some AI-related technologies that I saw at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. This article talks about CES announcements from SanDisk, Kioxia, SK hynix, Micron, Samsung and Macronix.

Let’s start with Western Digital and its SanDisk brand, which will soon emerge as a separate company. The first of these products is the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, part of the company’s creator storage series, some of which are shown below. It is designed for the production of content on the go and can record video in 4K resolution at 60 fps in the Apple ProRes format. It connects to MagSafe-compatible smartphones and offers capacities of up to 2TB and performance of up to 1000MB/s read and up to 950MB/s write.

The Creator line also includes a microSD card with a capacity of up to 1 TB and a card reader, a UHS-II SD card with a capacity of up to 1 TB, a phone holder with Lightning and USC-C connectors and capacities of up to 128 GB to allow mobility of content between phones and other devices, a USB-C flash drive, a portable Creator Pro SSD with up to 4 TB capacity, and a desktop with a sleek car look.

SanDisk also released an Extreme Pro dual USB-A and USB-C drive and a Fortnight Peely Edition video game SSD and USB drives for gamers to store video clips of their games. The SSD version comes with a refundable ax.

KIOXIA was showcasing a number of products in a meeting room during CES 2025. This included scalable BiCS 3D flash memory technology solutions, SSDs and software for AI, flash memory solutions for automotive, consumer and industrial applications and a line of SSDs KYOXIA. These included UFS solutions for automotive applications such as the UFS 3.1 product on a testbed shown on the right below, as well as a number of enterprise and data center SSDs shown on the left below.

SSDs have become the primary storage in many data centers, and they provide high-performance data movement to support compute-intensive applications such as various types of AI training and inference.

KIOXIA introduced UFS version 4.0 embedded flash memory devices for automotive applications. The company said these products have achieved SPICE level 2 certification. Automotive Software Process Improvement and Capability Definition (SPICE) is based on the ISO/IEC 33000 series of standards. These standards are an internationally recognized framework for evaluating and improving the software development process tailored to the automotive industry.

SK hynix had a large memory exhibit in the main hall at CES 2025. The company focused on the role of memory in AI training and inference. The focus of the company’s CES showcase was its AI data center. The exhibition featured the company’s high-bandwidth memory, HBM, server DRAM, eSSD, compute express connectivity, CXL 2, products and in-memory processing, PIM, products.

SK hynix showed its HBM3E products, an enhanced version of the HBM3. This includes up to 16 stacked DRAM chips providing up to 48 GB of electrical connectivity using silicon vias, TSVs, shown below. The company also showed DDR5 RDIMMs and MCR DIMMs, high-speed server DRAM modules tailored for data center environments, and its eSSD (enterprise SSD) solutions, including the PS1010, PEB110 and PE9010, also featured below.

SK hynix showed some of its CXL, CMM-DDR54 and CMM-Ax products. The company’s PIM solutions include GDDR6-AiM and AiMX6, a high-speed, low-power accelerator card that performs computational functions. AiMX stands for memory-based accelerator. They also showed AI solutions in the device.

SK hynix also showed consumer-oriented memory devices. These included LPCAMM2, the ZUFS9 4.0 mobile NAND solution, and PCB01—for computing with on-device AI. LPCAMM2 is presented in some detail below.

During his keynote at CES on Sunday night, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA announced that Micron HBM and DDR memories were being used in the latest GPU product from NIVIA. I visited the Micron meeting room at CES and took pictures of the band 9 NAND flash and 300mm DRAM wafers, as well as four video streams playing from a quad-port SSD, see below.

Micron’s booth focused on its consumer-oriented Crucial products, specifically memory for gaming systems. However, the company was also showing off various consumer, as well as enterprise and data center-oriented products from memory and solid-state storage, as shown below.

The slogan of Samsung’s CES booth was “AI for everyone” and they showcased AI in all of their consumer products. To enable AI, Samsung needs to have the storage and memory to support these apps. As the largest manufacturer of DRAM and NAND flash, they are well placed to support this.

Samsung received the CES 2025 Innovation Awards for their LPDDR5X DRAM memory. This is a device manufactured with 12 nm lithography technology, 10.7 GB/s data rate, 32 GB capacity and 25% lower power consumption than previous generation products. This product targets data centers as well as consumer and automotive applications.

Samsung was also showing its HBM3E chips with 12 DRAM chip layers and 36GB capacity and giving a peak at the company’s HBM4 work. Their HBM products also included an HBM PIM. Samsung says the HBM PIM is able to handle some of the logic functions by integrating an AI engine called a Programmable Computing Unit (PCU) into the memory core.

Samsung is offering PIM versions of its latest HBM, LPDDR and GDDR products. The company was also showing CXL memory modules, the CMM-D, with integrated CXL controllers and discussed memory coupling using CXL. The image below features some of Samsung’s CES 2025 announcements.

Samsung was also showing LPDDR products for the automotive industry. The company also says it has developed SSDs for SDV and next-generation automotive zone architectures. They call this product a sharable AutoSSD and it allows data access to multiple SoCs through virtualization. This product is planned to ship in an E1.S-like configuration with support for PCIe Gen 4 connectivity.

I interviewed Macronix CEO Miin Wu at CES 2025. He talked about the company’s plans to introduce 3D NOR chip technology that the company hopes to introduce by the end of 2025, see image below. He said that this initial product is a 30-layer NOR that will have a capacity of 4 GB and that there is a lot of interest in this standalone product.

I believe he said there will be DDR configurations as well as Octo and Quad for the 3D NOR product. During our interview, Wu also talked about the company’s 3D NAND activities, saying that the company is working on controller as well as memory technologies. He said their 48- and 96-layer 3D NAND products are available, and 192-layer is coming soon. Macronix is ​​a small company trying to do big things. I also asked him about their involvement in the chiplet and he said that they are part of the UCIe consortium.

SanDisk, Kioxia, SK hynix, Micron, Samsung and Macronix were showcasing their storage and memory solutions at CES 2025.