Kioxia announced today that it has successfully developed a high-capacity, high-bandwidth flash memory module prototype designed for AI large model applications, featuring 5TB capacity and 64GB/s bandwidth, aimed at breaking through the traditional trade-off between capacity and bandwidth in conventional storage devices.
According to Kioxia, in the post-5G/6G era, wireless networks are expected to achieve higher speeds, lower latency, and support simultaneous connections to more devices. However, transmitting data to cloud servers for processing increases latency across the entire network (including wired networks), making real-time applications difficult to operate. This necessitates widespread deployment of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers that can process data closer to users, which is expected to drive digital transformation across various industries.
Meanwhile, demand for advanced artificial intelligence applications, including generative AI, has continued to grow in recent years. As MEC server performance improves, storage modules are required to have larger capacity and higher bandwidth.
Kioxia explained that this achievement is expected to accelerate the adoption of applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, and advanced artificial intelligence processing, particularly in scenarios like post-5G/6G Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers. With the growth of emerging demands such as generative AI, the company will promote early commercialization and practical application of this research achievement.
To simultaneously meet large capacity and high bandwidth requirements, Kioxia employed multiple innovative technologies during development, such as daisy chain connections, which串connect controllers to each Flash storage board, avoiding the bandwidth degradation problem that occurs with capacity expansion in bus-type structures.
Additionally, Kioxia applied 128Gbps PAM4 high-speed low-power transceivers, using high-speed differential serial signals rather than parallel signals between controllers to reduce connection numbers, and utilizing PAM4 to achieve 128Gbps bandwidth while reducing power consumption.
Kioxia also adopted flash memory performance enhancement technologies, including flash memory pre-read technology to reduce read latency for sequential access, and low-amplitude signal and distortion correction technology to increase the transmission rate of controller and flash memory interfaces to 4.0Gbps.
Based on these foundations, Kioxia completed the development of storage controller and module prototypes based on PCIe 6.0 (64Gbps, 8 channels). Test results show that the module can achieve 5TB capacity and 64GB/s bandwidth with power consumption below 40 watts.