Kioxia samples UFS 5.0 flash for on-device AI
Kioxia has announced UFS 5.0 embedded flash memory devices for AI-enabled mobile and edge hardware, targeting higher performance, efficiency and capacity for workloads that increasingly run directly on devices. The company plans to demonstrate the new solutions next week at FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage.
Commercial samples are now available in 1 TB and 512 GB capacities, and mass production is expected to begin by the end of 2026. The devices are built on the JEDEC UFS 5.0 standard and use the MIPI M-PHY v6.0 physical layer with the UniPro v3.0 protocol, including HS-Gear6 operation.
Kioxia says the design supports theoretical interface speeds of up to 46.6 Gb/s per lane and approximately 10.8 GB/s of effective dual-lane read/write performance. The company positions the storage upgrade as a way to reduce data-access bottlenecks for large language models, multimodal AI, advanced imaging and real-time inference, with faster application loading and improved responsiveness compared with UFS 4.1.