This is the last of my blogs on the 2025 CES in Las Vegas. In this blog I will talk about meetings with Phison, Weebit Nano, Seagate Technology and OWC. I also discuss my meetings with Ambiq, Alexera and Hailo. Digital storage and memory technologies are enabling AI applications in consumer devices.
I met with Phison at the 2025 CES and they spoke with me about their partnership to supply controllers for Micron SSD products that includes Micron Crucial NVMe Gen5 SSDs. Phison said that they started to supply NVMe controllers for Crucial products starting with Gen4. The Gen5 products are made at 7nm advanced nodes and enable lower power and higher performance.
In particular, at the 2025 CES, Phison controllers were in the Crucial PS5028-E28 consumer SSD with up to 14.5GB/s sequential read and write performance with synchronous random performance at 3M IOPS read and write and 8.5W average power consumption. They were also controlling the PS5031-E31T PCIe Gen5 SSD for desktop and notebook use.
Phison was also showing their PS2251-21, U21, a USB4 SoC NAND flash controller with up to 4GB/s read and write speeds and supporting up to 8TB without a bridge chip. The U21 is a compact form factor that enables new product designs in large and small form factor enclosures, see below. Phison is also selling its Pascari controllers for enterprise applications.
I met Coby Hanoch from Weebit Nano at a Venetian hotel room during the CES and we spoke about recent progress they have made with their non-volatile resistive memory technology. The biggest news is that Weebit has licensed its memory technology to onsemi. Onsemi plans to use Weebit as a memory to replace eFlash, NOR flash, on its 65nm Treo Platform. This platform is targeting advanced automotive and industry applications. Onsemi is interested in using Weebit’s ReRAM for the technologies cost and power efficiency. This agreement increases the number of fab licensees for Weebit to three including Onsemi, DB HiTek and SkyWater.
Weebit’s ReRAM technology is a back end of line process, BEOL, with many advantages over eFlash. It only uses two masks, with familiar fab materials and using conventional process equipment. Weebit has also demonstrated product produced by Global Foundries at a 22nm node.
Seagate was in another Venetian hotel room showing their latest products and talking with analysts about future plans. In particular the products displays were from the Seagate, LaCie and Firecuda brands, shown below.
Lance Ohara from Seagate and Dave Helmly from Adobe made presentations focusing on digital storage for creatives, such as in media and entertainment. Lance said that smart curation of data enables creation and like many other industries, Seagate is looking at how AI can help with future digital storage solutions.
OWC had an exhibit at Showstoppers where they were showing some of their products. In particular the company its Thunderblade X12 and active optical cable as well as general availability of a Thunderbolt 5 Hub, shown below.
The ThunderBlade X12 is a production shuttle RAID solution for use with up to 12K RAW video and stereoscopic 360 degree VR, special video, content and will be available in March. The OWC USB4 40Gb/s active optical cable allows long-distance reliable and high-performance connectivity of Thunderbolt 4/3 and USB4/3/2 devices. The optical cable provides up to 40Gb/s bandwidth and up to 240W of power delivery as well as 8K video streaming up to 15 feet. It features USB-C connectivity and with optical fiber connectivity it eliminates the 2-meter distance limit of Cu-based Thunderbolt and USB4 cables.
The OWC Thunderbolt 5 Hub is now generally available and provides 3 Thunderbolt 5 ports and one USB-A port with up to 80Gb/s of bi-directional data speed and up to 120Gb/s for higher display bandwidth needs.
I also had a chance to talk with 3 artificial intelligence chip companies aimed at embedded consumer and other markets at or just before the 2025 CES including Ambiq, Alexera and Hailo. Ambiq announced that their Ambiq 4 SoC chips with MRAM memory were being used in ThinkAR AILens, see below, as well as several lower cost, lower power hearing aids.
The AILens weighs just 35grams and has 10+ hours of battery life, due to the lower power modes possible with a non-volatile memory for the AI training. The Arm Cortex®M4F microprocessor in the Ambiq 4, achieves up to 192 MHz for processing graphics, audio, and AI models.
In addition, the company said that their Apollo 5 SoC chips doubled the available MRAM memory to 4MB. Ambiq’s chips are manufactured by TSMC and are also used in various Fitbit and other wearable products.
I met with Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Alexera AI, a Netherlands-based startup working on AI inference solutions at the edge. He showed me three generations of their AI chips, Metis AI Accelerator, below with the earliest on the left and the most recent on the right.
The company is offering an M.2 AI Edge accelerator card with a quad-core Metis AIPU and a variety of evaluation systems working with ARM, aetina, Dell, Lenovo and Advantech. The company’s products are focusing on AI computing and video analysis. The general AI platform integrates the company’s Voyager SDK and hardware.
In December 2024 Alexera and Arduino announced a collaboration that combines Axelera AI’s Metis AI Platform with Arduino Pro’s SOMs, offering developers and businesses easy-to-use, cost-effective tools to power AI innovation across industries. Although I did not see it myself, Alexera was demonstrating an AI-powered industrial monitoring system featuring pre-trained LLMs (Phi-3) and the Arduino Portenta X8 to analyze sensor data (temperature, humidity, CO2, etc.) in real time.
I also visited Hailo’s demonstration room in the Venetian where I saw their AI chip, see below, and various applications. They were showing their Hailo-8 AI Processor, the Hailo-10H M.2 AI acceleration module for immersive generative AI and a Hailo-15 chip, introduced in April 2024, providing sophisticated vision processing capability for smart cameras and providing up to 10TOPs performance. The company said that they had over 300 customers qualifications with 90% of their applications vision based.
The Hailo-8 is available as a Chip On Board, COB, M.2 and well as PCIe card configurations. Many of the Hailo demonstrations involved a Hailo AI HAT+ for a Raspberry Pi. In particular, there were demonstrations illustrating several vision processing applications, see below, as well as interesting applications such as a radar edge processing device and video processing for aerial drones.
There was also a demonstration unit with an AIC storage server as well as an exhibit with a rugged SSD storage server.
Digital storage and memory capability play a crucial role in modern computing, including AI. The 2025 CES show showed advancements in NAND flash controllers, non-volatile memory and various AI applications.