A trio of companies are in development of a PCIe 5.0-compatible broadband solid-state drive (SSD) with an optical interface designed for green data centers.
Kioxia, AIO Core and Kyocera have developed a prototype based on their technologies that will be integrated into the broadband optical SSD for applications that require high-speed transfer of large data like generative AI.
The companies said the PCIe 5.0 interface allows twice the bandwidth of the previous PCIe 4.0 generation through AIO Core’s optical transceiver and Kyocera’s optoelectronic integration module technologies. Kipoxia is developing the broadband optical SSD where these devices will be integrated.
Why it matters
Replacing the electrical wiring interface with optical technology and using broadband optical SSD technology increases the physical distance between the compute and storage devices while maintaining energy efficiency and high signal quality.
The companies said this helps the data center system to be more flexible and efficient to enable generative AI in high-speed data processing.
The project is part of the Japanese New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) subsidy where companies are tasked with developing next generation technologies with the goal to achieve more than 40% energy savings compared to current data centers.
