Solid State Storage and Memory at CES 2025

Digital storage and memory enable all of our consumer devices and applications, whether running on-premises or from the cloud. My next few blogs will look at various digital storage products and some AI-related technology 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 the SanDisk brand, which will soon be spun off as a separate company. The first of these products is the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, part of the company’s Creator line of storage, some of which can be seen below. Designed for content production on the go, it can record 4K video at 60 fps in Apple ProRes format. It connects to MagSafe compatible smartphones and offers a capacity of up to 2 TB and a performance of up to 1000MB/s read and up to 950MB/s write.

The Creator series 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 module with Lightning and USC-C connectors and a capacity of up to 128 GB to allow move content between phones and other devices, a USB-C flash drive, a Creator Pro portable SSD with up to 4TB capacity, and a sleek drive desktop.

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 redeemable ax.

KIOXIA was showcasing a range of products in a conference room during CES 2025. This included scalable BiCS 3D flash memory technology solutions, SSDs and software for artificial intelligence, flash memory solutions for automotive, consumer and industrial applications and a range of KIOXIA SSDs . These included UFS solutions for automotive applications, such as the UFS 3.1 product in 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 primary storage in many data centers and provide high-performance data movement to support compute-intensive applications such as various types of artificial intelligence 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 dEtermination (SPICE) is based on the ISO/IEC 33000 series of standards. These standards are an internationally recognized framework for evaluating and improving software development process adapted to the automotive industry.

SK hynix had a large memory exhibition 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 show was the AI ​​data center. The exhibition featured the company’s high bandwidth memory, HBM, server DRAM, eSSD, compute express link, CXL 2, products and in-memory processing, PIM, products.

SK hynix introduced its HBM3E products, an extended version of HBM3. This includes up to 16 stacked DRAM chips providing up to 48GB with electrical connections via silicon diodes, TSVs, shown below. The company also showcased DDR5 RDIMMs and MCR DIMMs, high-speed server DRAM modules tailored for data center environments, as well as its eSSD (enterprise SSD) solutions, including the PS1010, PEB110 and PE9010, also seen below.

SK hynix showcased some of its CXL products, CMM-DDR54 and CMM-Ax. The company’s PIM solutions include GDDR6-AiM and AiMX6, a high-speed, low-power acceleration card that performs compute functions. AiMX stands for Accelerator-in-Memory Based Accelerator. They also demonstrated artificial intelligence solutions on the device.

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

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

Micron’s booth focused on Crucial’s consumer-oriented products, particularly memory for gaming systems. However, the company also showcased various memory and solid-state storage products aimed at consumers, as well as enterprises and data centers, as seen below.

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

Samsung received CES 2025 Innovation Awards for LPDDR5X DRAM memory. It is a device made with 12 nm lithographic technology, data speeds of 10.7 GB/s, 32 GB capacity and 25% lower power consumption than previous generation products. This product is aimed at data centers as well as consumer and automotive applications.

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

Samsung provides PIM versions of its latest HBM products, LPDDR and GDDR. The company was also showing CXL memory modules, CMM-D, with integrated CXL controllers and discussing memory aggregation using CXL. The image below showcases some of Samsung’s CES 2025 announcements.

Samsung also showcased LPDDR products for the automotive industry. The company also says it has developed SSDs for next-generation SDV and zoned automotive architectures. They call this product removable AutoSSD and it allows data access across multiple SoCs through virtualization. This product is planned to ship in an E1.S 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 which the company hopes to introduce by the end of 2025, see the image below. He said that this initial product is a 30-layer NOR that will have a capacity of 4GB 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 business, saying that the company is working on controller technologies 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 chiplets and he told me that they are part of the UCIe consortium.

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