Western Digital: High-Endurance 3D NAND Solutions for Industrial, AI, ML, and IoT Applications

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) introduced a portfolio of products to address the growing need for high-endurance storage solutions in demanding industrial, smart and advanced manufacturing environments, including a variety of IoT devices.

The portfolio deploys high-endurance 3D NAND in a variety of form factors to provide industrial-market solutions for systems designers of edge computing gateways, robotics, medical, inspection/surveillance, and AI and ML applications for industrial and IoT system designers.

Industry 4.0 and industrial storage
The fourth wave of the industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, connects industrial devices and allows companies to utilize networked data from IoT devices, and computer-controlled systems. Applying AI and ML to this data helps create automated smart factories, smart cities and more.

“As more industrial applications and devices apply AI and ML algorithms to get real-time actionable insights, the need for versatile and durable storage solutions increases,” said Oded Sagee, senior director, device group, WD. “Western Digital’s industrial-grade, storage solutions provide the high endurance, low power and reliability essential for IIoT equipment such as robotics, gateways, AI-enabled devices, edge computing products and drones.”

The industrial storage products are a solution for equipment that must operate in harsh environments such as elevated temperatures, humidity, elevation or vibration. These solutions offer the ability to store and process more data with extended data retention.

“Industry 4.0 is all about being digitally enabled and data driven,” said Ryan Martin, principal analyst, ABI Research. “This means bringing together new technologies and compute services across edge and cloud assets to drive productivity, create new business models, and innovate faster. These technologies include everything from advanced analytics and AI to augmented reality, digital twins, and industrial IoT platforms, and together serve the core needs of the manufacturing sector.“

Wdc Automotive Inand At Em132

64-layer 3D NAND e.MMC built for industrial and IoT markets
The company’s iNAND IX EM132 EFD is a first 3D NAND e.MMC built with the firm’s 64-layer 3D NAND technology for Industrial and IoT devices. It offers versions that support operating temperature ranges of either -25°C to +85°C or -40°C to 85°C. It extends the life of e.MMC beyond 2D NAND and provides increased capacity for industrial and consumer applications powered by OSs, sensor fusion and ML. It also encompasses a feature set designed for intensive industrial workloads.

These features include:

Health monitoring
Thermal management
Smart partitioning
Auto and manual read refresh
Power management
Data retention that meets JEDEC standards

“The IoTs and Industrial IoTs power mission-critical applications that require high reliability. A high-quality storage solution combined with a high-quality programming process for these devices during manufacturing is critical to the overall performance of the application,” said Anthony Ambrose, president and CEO, Data I/O Corp. “Data I/O partners with Western Digital to support the iNAND IX EM132 on our LumenX programming platform to deliver a high-endurance, reliable storage needed to ensure proper operation of mission-critical products.“

Endurance SD and microSD cards for industrial and IoT markets
The company’s IX LD342 SD and IX QD342 micro SD cards provide endurance for OEM, distributors, resellers, integrators and industrial system designers to gain flexibility for emerging industrial applications:

Utilizes firm’s 3D NAND technology
Provides capacity ranges from 16 to 512GB
Offers endurance (3,000 P/E cycles) for a longer lifecycle
Includes a card health monitor that provides the ability to gauge the remaining endurance and proactively service the card if needed or desired