Technology development at KIOXIA Corporation

Marketing planners develop product specifications incorporating customers’ requirements while considering marketing strategies and initiate product development. Based on market analysis, market planners devise development strategies and promote product development so as to offer proposals for total solutions to worldwide customers, including technical support and sales assistance.

The design team develops new circuit technologies and creates memory designs in such a manner as to reduce chip area, ensure reliability, increase operating speed, and reduce power consumption. The design team performs a wide range of tasks from system design, detailed circuit design, and layout to the evaluation and analysis of prototype chips.

Memory development requires a broad spectrum of cutting-edge technologies.

The device development team designs and evaluates memory devices incorporating cutting-edge process and production technologies while collaborating with the production team on development tasks. The device development team also develops super-small-geometry and super-high-performance unit processes as well as cutting-edge test and measuring technologies for next-generation memory devices, and combines them in the optimal manner to establish process recipes for next-generation and post-next-generation memory devices.

The package development team is responsible for the development of packages for memory devices, which encompasses mechanical design, substrate wiring design, assembly process development, and the evaluation of heat and shock resistance. Packages not only protect semiconductor chips and provide chip-to-board interconnection but also make it possible to increase the capacity and functionality of memory devices through 3D multi-layer chip stacking and controller chip integration.

The controller design team develops LSI chips that act as a bridge between the memory and the host computer. To improve memory performance, memory controllers incorporate various technologies, including those for bad-block management, error correction, logical-to-physical address translation, write leveling, speed improvement, encryption, and power consumption reduction. Cutting-edge hardware and embedded software technologies are employed to realize such controllers.

The product development follows the specification development and the designing of constituent components. The product development team creates products that help enhance customer value, considering various factors such as function requirements, performance, thermal issues, mechanical strength, compliance with safety and radio standards, and costs. The product development team is also responsible for the research necessary for the product development by architecting next-generation memory, and benchmarking technology and product strategy.

The manufacturing team assembles prototype devices to verify their specification, functionality, electrical characteristics, and reliability from the viewpoints of evaluation analysis and quality assurance. The manufacturing team also develops tools at the development, production, and customer support stages to solve problems. In addition, this team identifies problems quickly through the customer approval process and fix them to bring high-quality products to market.

The evaluation team establishes schemes for the performance evaluation and shipping test of prototype and production devices. At the development stage, the evaluation team provides feedback to the design and process teams concerning the prototypes that do not meet the design specifications. At the manufacturing stage, the evaluation team is responsible for delivering only conforming devices to customers.

At KIOXIA Corporation, memory devices are manufactured using a collection of the most advanced technologies. Big data are collected from manufacturing and testing equipments and analyzed using machine learning and other AI techniques so as to improve productivity and foster technological innovation. The production team also grasps customers’ applications of our products with the aim of proper quality management.