Samsung Electronics continues to promote its large-capacity SSD offering while major rival Kioxia expects automotive SSD demand to remain strong with no plans to cut its output for the category.
Despite a slowdown in the PC and smartphone sectors, demand for automotive devices has increased considerably, according to Kioxia CTO Shigenori Yanagi at a recent technology summit in China. Kioxia has reduced overall NAND flash output by 30% since the fourth quarter of 2022, although there are no plans to lower output for automotive products.
Automotive electronics will be Kioxia's key market in China, said Yanagi, adding that the NAND flash memory maker has set a target of quadrupling its sales in China's automotive electronics sector in the future.
Also at the summit, Kim Kyung-ryun, Samsung VP and GM of NAND product planning group, stated that the company is still focused on large-capacity SSDs.
Samsung developed its first 64TB SSD at the end of 2019 and a 128TB SSD prototype with QLC NAND in 2021. Development of larger-capacity SSDs is underway, with a 1PB SSD poised to debut in the next ten years, according to Kim.
In addition, Kim commented that 3D NAND flash fabrication has led to ongoing improvements in data storage capacity, and that technical growth would take place in three areas: physical scaling technology, logical scaling technology, and packaging technology.
And faced with competitors' ongoing development of 3D NAND high-stacking processes, Kioxia remains confident in its technological innovation. According to Yanagi, while memory density indicates costs, the number of layers of 3D NAND flash does not equal density. Although relaxing the layer thickness and hole memory spacing can easily result in more layers of NAND flash, Kioxia does not want to follow that route, Yanagi indicated. Pitch reduction and other related technologies for increasing density should also be considered. Kioxia's R&D approach of increasing the number of stacked layers of 3D NAND remains unchanged, Yanagi said.
