New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO), Japan’s national research and development agency, has entered into an agreement Kioxia Corporation, a global leader in memory solutions formerly known as Toshiba Memory. The proposed goal of the alliance is that the Kioxia Corporation will pioneer new memory technology to advance the capabilities of the infrastructure in post-5G communication systems.
As much of the Asia-Pacific region moves into a post-5G era, the sheer amount of data produced by networked devices is increasing, a trend that will undoubtedly be spurred on by data created and used by AI. The needed increase in data throughput will drive the demand for cutting-edge data processing in data centres running communications systems, and new solutions are needed to manage increased capacity.
Kioxia is promising to address those requirements in its work with NEDO. It will focus on the research into and eventual production of memory for the Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) interface standard, designed for high-performance data centre environments.
Next-generation memory technology has to be capable of supporting swift data transfer from high-performance processors, while simultaneously offering increased storage capacity and reducing energy use.
The aim of the initiative is to engineer memory with lower energy demands, increase bit density from levels than currently achievable by today’s DRAM architectures, and offer greater read speeds than current flash memory.
As new generations of processors and connectors appear on the market, data centre operators and their customers will be working to ensure a return on investment for new CPU hardware, and seek to eliminate bottlenecks in the rest of the hardware stack. Having better-performing memory that offers greater capacity than what’s available at present is just one challenge; another is the need to produce such a solution that also consumes less power and therefore produces less heat.
With post-5G technology close to production in many territories in the APAC region, the implications of greater demand on communications technology mean operators in the telecoms space may have to reconsider their infrastructure and its inherent limitations. Core infrastructure is expensive to replace, and it must be designed to be as future-proof as possible, with extra capacity and capability that will allow ensuing generational upgrades.
NEDO’s activities include battery technology research, renewable energy, next-gen power generation, and industrial technology designed for manufacturers and engineering companies in Japan. Its remit is a more sustainable, more technologically-advanced future for the country . NEDO’s ethos is humanitarian as well as financial, so Kioxia’s work in developing larger-capacity, faster, and lower-powered memory for use in diverse applications made it a logical choice.
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