How We Reduce the Impact of Our Products on the Environment
The NAND flash memory and Solid State Drive (SSD) Products that Kioxia Group supplies are integrated into a wide range of applications and used throughout the world. We are making efforts to reduce the environmental impact of our products on every stage of their lifecycle; this includes reducing CO2 emissions per product capacity during manufacturing and providing our customers with products that consume efficiently as less energy as possible when in use.
Given recent technological innovation in the fields of AI, IoT and autonomous driving, there is a growing need to increase the capacity and speed of NAND flash memory and SSD products. Kioxia Group's ongoing development of integration technology and the resulting increased capacity are allowing us to reduce the levels of CO2 emission per product capacity during manufacturing. Specifically, this is being achieved by reducing the amount of electricity and materials per product capacity used during manufacturing, and improving the energy consumption efficiency of our products for processing 1GB data when they are in use.
Furthermore, faster devices with even greater capacities will be required for 5G mobile communication systems, which are becoming more widespread. From an environmental perspective, there is concern that this will result in even more electricity being required to operate such devices. For this reason, we expect the use of highly energy consumption-efficient, large-capacity flash memory and high-throughput SSD products to expand to a number of new fields. As our top priority, we are therefore looking to provide more energy consumption-efficient and higher-capacity products by developing more advanced design and integration technologies, in order to contribute to the realization of a low-carbon society.
How Kioxia Group’s Products Help Protect the Environment
Targets for Improving the Energy Consumption Efficiency of Our Products
The Kioxia Group will utilize these advanced technologies to further improve the high energy consumption efficiency of its products.
Specifically, we have set a high target of improving the energy consumption efficiency for processing 1GB by 50% by FY2025 from the FY2017 level.
In FY2022, we successfully achieved a reduction of around 27% in the energy consumption required to process 1GB data compared to FY2017 level, thereby making considerable progress towards our FY2025 targets. We were able to do this by achieving higher speeds, by integrating advanced technologies in our NAND flash memory, and by designing our own optimal controllers.
Targets：Improving the Energy Consumption Efficiency of Our Products
Case Studies: Improving the Energy Consumption Efficiency during Product Use
UFS Ver. 3.1 Embedded Flash Memory Devices for Automotive Applications
Kioxia Corporation developed new Automotive Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1 Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices.
Compared to the previous generation product2, the sequential read and write performance of the Automotive UFS Ver. 3.1 256GB device has been improved by approximately 2x and 4x respectively, while energy consumption efficiency for 1GB processing has been improved by approximately 35% and 70% respectively. Compared to the previous generation product, the new product is 0.1mm thinner and approximately 7.7% smaller in overall volume, helping to conserve resources.
The storage capacity of in-vehicle devices continues to increase with the growing sophistication of automotive infotainment systems3, advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), and the increase in external communication capabilities; to address these developments, this product lineup has a maximum capacity of 512GB.
We will help enable the development of in-vehicle applications that enhance the driver experience, and energy consumption efficiency in product use, by providing the high-performance storage required by increasingly complex in-vehicle devices.
UFS Ver. 3.1 Embedded Flash Memory Devices for Automotive Applications
1 Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a product category of embedded memory products built to JEDEC UFS standard specifications. Its serial interface allows UFS to support full duplexing, which enables both concurrent reading and writing between the host processor and UFS device.
2 Kioxia Corporation’s previous-generation 256GB device part number ‟THGAFBT1T83BAB5”.
3 A system that integrates driving-related information and support, such as navigation, and entertainment, including movies.
Notes:
(1) The advertised memory on each Kioxia product is based on the on-board memory capacity, not the amount of memory available for data storage by the end user. Since a portion of the memory capacity is used for memory management and other functions, the usable capacity will be less than that advertised; please refer to the product specifications for details.
(2) Read and write speeds represent the fastest times recorded under test conditions at Kioxia Corporation; we are unable to guarantee the read or write speeds of individual devices in actual use; these may vary depending on the device used.
(3) Company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of third-party companies.
Enterprise SSD Compatible with Next Generation High-Speed PCIe® 5.0 Interfaces
Kioxia Corporation has begun mass production of the new Kioxia CM7 series of enterprise SSDs; these support the next-generation high-speed PCIe® 5.0 interfaces used in high-performance servers and storage systems.
This product is PCIe® 5.0, NVMe™ 2.0 specification-compliant, and achieves a sequential read performance of up to 14GB/s, the industry’s fastest in its class.4
This achieves approximately 2x the maximum sequential read speed of our previous-generation Kioxia CM6 Series enterprise SSDs and approximately 1.7x the maximum sequential write performance. The 15.36TB5 product improves energy consumption efficiency by approximately 30% in sequential reads and 25% in sequential writes respectively.
The product lineup includes capacities of up to 15.36TB in the EDSFF (Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor) E3.S and Datacenter Standard Form Factor family of specifications, which is expected to become the next-generation form factor, and up to 30.72 TB in the conventional 2.5-inch form factor.6
By being the lead in the industry to introduce even faster next-generation SSDs, we will extend our leadership in the sector and significantly support the development of high-performance applications by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and improve the energy consumption efficiency of their products.
Enterprise SSD Kioxia CM7 Series
4 As of December 1, 2023 based on Kioxia Corporation survey of publicly available information.
5 Definition of capacity: Kioxia Corporation defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1 GB = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.
6 For the 2.5-inch form factor and U.3 connections, the transfer speed will be limited to that of PCIe® Gen4.
Notes:
(1) Read and write speeds vary depending on the host system, read/write conditions, file size, etc.
(2) PCIe is a registered trademark of PCI-SIG.
(3) NVMe is a registered trademark or trademark of NVM Express, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
(4) Other company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of third-party companies.
