Digital storage and memory enable all of our consumer devices and applications, whether running on a local device or from the cloud. My next blogs will look at various digital storage products and some AI related technology I saw at the 2025 CES 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 its SanDisk brand, soon to be spun out as a separate company. The first of these products is the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, part of the company’s Creator storage series, a few of which are shown below. It is designed for producing content on the move and can record 4K resolution video at 60fps videos in Apple ProRes format. It attaches to MagSafe-compatible smartphones and offers capacities up to 2TB and performance of up to 1000MB/s read and up to 950MB/s write.
The Creator line also includes a microSD card with capacities up to 1TB and card reader, an SD UHS-II card with capacities up to 1TB, a phone drive with both lightning and USC-C connectors and capacities up to 128GB for allowing movement of content between phones and other devices, a USB-C flash drive, a Creator Pro portable SSD with capacities up to 4TB and a sleek looking desktop drive.
SanDisk also released an Extreme Pro dual USB-A and USB-C drive and a video game Fortnight Peely Edition SSDs and USB drives for gamers to store clips videos of their games. The SSD version comes with a redeemable pick-axe.
KIOXIA was showing a number of products at a meeting room during the 2025 CES. This included scalable BiCS 3D flash memory technology solutions, SSDs and software for AI, flash memory solutions for automotive, consumer and industrial applications and a lineup of KIOXIA SSDs. These included UFS solutions for automotive applications such as the UFS 3.1 product in a test bed shown on the right below as well as a number of enterprise and data center SSDs shown to the left below.
SSDs have become primary storage in many data centers and they provide high performance data movement to support computation intensive applications such as various types of AI training and inference.
KIOXIA introduced UFS version 4.0 embedded flash memory devices for automotive applications. The company said that these products have achieved SPICE level 2 certification. The Automotive Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE) is based upon the ISO/IEC 33000 series of standards. These standards are an internationally recognized framework for assessing and improving software development process tailors to the automotive industry.
SK hynix had a large memory exhibit in the central hall at the 2025 CES. The company focused on memory’s role in AI training and inference. The focus of the company’s CES exhibit was its AI data center. The exhibit featured the company’s high bandwidth memory, HBM, server DRAM, eSSD, compute express link, CXL 2, products, and processing in memory, PIM, products.
SK hynix showed its HBM3E products, an extended version of HBM3. This includes up to 16 stacked DRAM chips providing up to 48GB with electrical connections using through silicon vias, TSVs, shown below. The company also showed DDR5 RDIMM and MCR DIMM, 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 shown below.
SK hynix showed 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 accelerator card which performs computational functions. AiMX stands for Accelerator-in-Memory Based Accelerator. They also showed on-device AI solutions.
SK hynix also showed consumer-oriented memory devices. These included LPCAMM2, the mobile NAND solution ZUFS9 4.0, and PCB01—for on-device AI PCs. The LPCAMM2 is shown in some detail below.
During his CES keynote talk on Sunday night, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA announced that Micron HBMs and DDR memories were being used in the latest GPU product from NIVIA. I visited the Micron meeting room at the CES and took pictures of generation 9 NAND flash and DRAM 300mm wafers as well as four video streams playing from a quad-port SSD, see below.
Micron’s booth focused on its Crucial consumer-oriented products, in particular memory for gaming systems. However, the company was also showing various consumer as well as enterprise and data center oriented memory and solid state storage products as shown below.
Samsung’s CES booth slogan was “AI for All,” and they featured AI in all of their consumer products. To enable AI Samsung needs to have storage and memory to support these applications. As the largest manufacturer of DRAM and NAND flash, they are in a good place to support this.
Samsung received CES 2025 Innovation Awards for their LPDDR5X DRAM memory. This is a device made with 12nm lithographic technology, 10.7GB/s data rates, 32GB capacity and 25% lower power consumption than previous generation products. This product is aimed at data center as well as consumer and automotive applications.
Samsung was also showing its HBM3E chips with 12 DRAM chip layers and 36GB capacity and giving a peak at the company’s HBM4 work. Their HBM products also included a PIM HBM. Samsung says that the HBM PIM is able to process some of the logic functions by integrating an AI engine called the Programmable Computing Unit (PCU) in the memory core.
Samsung is providing PIM versions of its latest HBM, LPDDR and GDDR products. The company was also showing CXL memory modules, CMM-D, with integrated CXL controllers and discussed memory pooling using CXL. The image below features some of Samsung’s 2025 CES announcements.
Samsung was also showing LPDDR products for the automotive industry. The company also says it has been developing SSDs for SDV and next generation zonal automotive architectures. They call this product a detachable AutoSSD and allows data access to multiple SoCs through virtualization. This product is planned to ship in an E1.S-like configuration with support for PCIe Gen 4 connectivity.
I interviewed Macronix CEO Miin Wu at the 2025 CES. He talked about the company’s plans to introduce 3D NOR chip technology that the company hopes to introduce by the end of 2025, see 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 stand-alone product.
I believe that he said that there will be DDR as well as Octo and Quad configurations for the 3D NOR product. During our interview Wu also talked about the company’s 3D NAND activities, saying that the company is working on controller as well as memory technologies. He said that 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 said that they are part of the UCIe consortium.
SanDisk, Kioxia, SK hynix, Micron, Samsung and Macronix were showing their storage and memory solutions at the 2025 CES.
