Kioxia, AIO Core and Kyocera Announce Development of PCIe 5.0-Compatible Broadband Optical SSD for Next-Gen Green Data Centers

Kioxia Corporation, AIO Core Co., Ltd. and Kyocera Corporation announced the development of a prototype of a PCIe 5.0-compatible broadband SSD with an optical interface (broadband optical SSD).

The 3 companies will develop technologies for broadband optical SSDs to enhance their suitability for advanced applications that require high-speed transfer of large data, such as GenAI, and will also apply them to proof-of-concept (PoC) tests for future social implementation.

The new prototype achieved functional operation with the high-speed PCIe 5.0 interface, which is twice the bandwidth of the previous PCIe 4.0 Gen ^[1], through the combination of AIO Core’s IOCore optical transceiver and Kyocera’s OPTINITY optoelectronic integration module technologies.

In next-gen green data centers, by replacing the electrical wiring interface with optical and utilizing broadband optical SSD technology significantly increases the physical distance between the compute and storage devices, while maintaining energy efficiency and high signal quality. It also contributes to the flexibility and efficiency of data center system design, where digital diversification and the evolution of GenAI require complex, high-volume, high-speed data processing.

This achievement is the result of the Japanese Next Generation Green Data Center Technology Development project JPNP21029. It is subsidized by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), which is under the Green Innovation Fund Project: Construction of Next Generation Digital Infrastructure. In this project, companies will develop next-gen technologies with the goal of achieving more than 40% energy savings compared to current data centers. As part of this project, Kioxia is developing broadband optical SSDs, AIO Core is developing optoelectronic fusion devices and Kyocera is developing optoelectronic device packages.

^[1] Compared to Kioxia’s broadband optical SSD announced on August 7, 2024.