Update — As of Sep 2025

Quick rewind: in April 2023, the U.S. Justice Department announced a settlement with Micron over an Immigration and Nationality Act hiring violation — back pay of $85,000 to the affected worker, a civil penalty, required training, policy fixes, and a two-year monitoring period. That clock started then. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

As of April 2025, that two-year window has run its course. The DOJ’s public materials haven’t flagged any extension or follow-on enforcement tied to this matter — which, in plain English, suggests Micron did what it said it would do and the government didn’t see cause (so far) to push further. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

A small footnote worth keeping: while DOJ press language didn’t specify the penalty amount, multiple industry/legal summaries pegged the civil penalty at $4,144, alongside the $85,000 back-pay figure. Think of that as the “administrative sting,” with the real teeth being training, policy changes, and monitoring. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

Morris take: compliance isn’t a finish line; it’s a treadmill. Micron has been broadcasting governance and ethics updates in 2025 filings and sustainability materials — the right kind of noise if you’re trying to keep regulators, customers, and investors calm. No drama beats new drama every time. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}

The Justice Department has reached a settlement with Micron Technology Inc., headquartered in Boise, Idaho, after finding the company violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The case centered on allegations that Micron discriminated against a U.S. citizen during hiring by favoring a temporary visa holder instead.

The investigation began after a U.S. citizen filed a complaint claiming he was unfairly denied a job. Federal investigators confirmed that Micron had chosen a temporary visa worker without fully considering the citizen’s qualifications. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), employers are prohibited from discriminating against job applicants based on citizenship, immigration status, or national origin unless specifically required by law.

As part of the settlement, Micron agreed to pay a civil penalty to the U.S. government and provide $85,000 in back pay to the affected worker. In addition, the company must retrain its staff on INA’s anti-discrimination rules, update hiring policies, and submit to federal monitoring for two years.

The Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division enforces the INA, which protects workers from discrimination in hiring, firing, recruitment, and employment eligibility verification. It also prohibits unfair documentary practices, retaliation, and intimidation. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke underscored that the Department will hold companies accountable for violations regardless of their size or industry.

This settlement is a reminder that compliance with civil rights laws must go hand in hand with corporate hiring practices, especially for companies as large and visible as Micron, a global leader in semiconductors and memory products.

Micron memory solutions include both DRAM and NAND flash memory. DRAM provides high-speed, temporary storage for active data and is critical in applications such as gaming, cloud computing, and enterprise workloads. NAND flash memory, a non-volatile technology, is widely used in SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives for long-term data storage. These technologies are key components in smartphones, servers, and data centers worldwide.

Known for reliability and energy efficiency, Micron’s products continue to power a range of industries—from automotive systems to consumer electronics and industrial automation—making the company a cornerstone in today’s digital infrastructure. While the lawsuit highlights compliance issues, it does not change Micron’s global reputation as a major innovator in memory and storage solutions.

M&G Investment Management Ltd. purchased a significant stake in Silicon Motion Technology Co. during the fourth quarter of 2022. The move came even as Silicon Motion (NASDAQ: SIMO) navigated a period of weaker-than-expected revenue, showing that M&G was betting on long-term growth rather than short-term earnings.

Silicon Motion, often shortened to SMI, is a leading developer of microcontrollers for NAND flash storage. Their chips sit at the heart of solid-state drives (SSDs), embedded multimedia cards (eMMCs), and flash solutions used in mobile devices, digital cameras, and industrial applications. The company’s engineering focus on speed, power efficiency, and durability has made it a trusted supplier in consumer, enterprise, and automotive markets.

The UK-based M&G Investment Management Ltd. saw opportunity despite market turbulence. By acquiring more shares, M&G expressed confidence that Silicon Motion’s roadmap of storage controllers and flash management software would translate into long-term gains. The UK firm, founded in 1931, is known for its disciplined, research-driven approach and is increasingly focused on companies aligned with digital transformation and sustainability themes.

Why M&G Chose Silicon Motion

Several factors made Silicon Motion attractive. First, rising demand for flash memory across data centers, smartphones, and cars created steady tailwinds. SMI’s NAND flash controllers are embedded in SSDs, USB flash drives, and memory cards, with clients ranging from global OEMs to niche storage specialists like Nexcopy.

Second, the company’s commitment to innovation stands out. Heavy investments in R&D and a deep intellectual property portfolio keep SMI at the forefront of controller design, ready to adapt as NAND geometry and system requirements evolve. This focus on continuous product refresh cycles ensures relevance even in volatile memory markets.

Third, Silicon Motion’s financial stability added to its appeal. With consistent cash flow generation, the company has been able to return capital to shareholders while also reinvesting in product development. That combination of resilience and growth potential is exactly what long-horizon investors like M&G look for.

Finally, the acquisition aligned with M&G’s strategy to back disruptive technology leaders. As global data creation accelerates, storage is mission-critical infrastructure. By increasing its position in Silicon Motion, M&G positioned itself to benefit from rising demand for SSDs, edge devices, and secure storage solutions.

In short, the Q4 2022 purchase underlined a vote of confidence: despite market headwinds, M&G believes Silicon Motion has the product depth, balance sheet strength, and vision to remain a dominant force in flash memory controllers for years to come.

Kioxia Holdings Corporation, abbreviated as Kioxia and stylized as KIOXIA, is a Japanese-American multinational computer memory manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo. In June 2018, Toshiba Memory Corporation was spun off from the Toshiba conglomerate. On March 1, 2019, it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Holdings Corporation and was renamed Kioxia in October 2019

While still a subsidiary of Toshiba, the company was credited with inventing flash memory in the early 1980s. The company is expected to have 18.3% of the global revenue share for NAND flash solid-state drives in the second quarter of 2021. Kioxia Corporation’s parent company is this one.

Fujio Masuoka, an engineer at Kioxia predecessor Toshiba, invented flash memory in 1980, and Masuoka and his colleagues presented their NOR flash invention in 1984.

Toshiba Corporation completed its acquisition of OCZ Storage Solutions in January 2014, renaming it OCZ and making it a Toshiba brand.

Toshiba Memory Corporation was spun off from Toshiba Corporation on June 1, 2018, due to heavy losses incurred by the bankruptcy of former parent company Toshiba’s Westinghouse subsidiary over nuclear power plant construction at Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in 2016. Toshiba retained 40.2% ownership of the new company. Toshiba’s memory businesses were all merged into the new company. On March 1, 2019, Toshiba Memory Corporation became a subsidiary of the newly formed Toshiba Memory Holdings Corporation.

Kioxia suffered a power outage at one of its factories in Yokkaichi, Japan, in June 2019, resulting in the loss of at least 6 exabytes of flash memory, with some sources estimating the loss to be as high as 15 exabytes. Western Digital used (and continues to use) Kioxia’s facilities to manufacture its own flash memory chips.

KV-CSD is an acronym for Key Value Store Computational Storage Device and Hynix a NAND memory manufacturer is directing their technology towards this storage approach.

Here at GetUSB.info we focus on NAND memory and typically look at the write speeds of devices. However, for data centers and analytic companies, the ability to retrieve data is more important. The ability to read the index of where data is and then retrieve it is a key part for data analytics and how companies can react to queries.

Just imagine something like an insurance company holding millions of policies and related customers who need to search and sort through large amounts of data quickly while servicing customers… now imagine that same requirement during a natural disaster where the incoming requests skyrocket. Quickly finding the data needed becomes a mission critical task.

Traditional methods for indexing are “relationship databases” and done on a file-record level. A file-record indexing approach uses predefined data structures in the database as a series of tables containing data about the type of information related to the files, like meta-data tags.

In contrast, key–value systems treat the data as a single transparent collection which can have many different values for each record in a column structure. The indexing values in a column provide a more efficient method to search the indexed data to more efficiently find the requested data.

What Hynix is doing is introducing a method to index content on the fly (as it’s being written) into NAND memory so when a subsequent search is performed the result will present itself more quickly.

Hynix teamed with Los Alamos National Laboratory in Northern New Mexico who is a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, and managed by Triad, a public service-oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

Reference material: Los Alamos National Laboratory website page about collaboration.

UFS 4.0 Has 2,800MB/Second Write Speeds

Samsung claims to have created the industry’s highest performing Universal Flash Storage (UFS). With read speeds of up to 4,200MB/s and write speeds of up to 2,800MB/s, UFS 4.0 is twice as fast as the previous generation.

Not only is UFS 4.0 faster than previous generations, but Samsung claims it also consumes less power. As a result, the company claims that it will be at the heart of future mobile storage solutions, having a dramatic impact on smartphone performance as well as having a significant impact on augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) hardware.

According to Samsung, UFS 4.0 comes in a small package that measures 11mm by 13mm by 1mm and can support capacities of up to 1TB. This 1 TB has a sequential read speed of 6 MB/s per mA, a 46 percent improvement over the previous generation’s power consumption.

“UFS 4.0 offers up to 23.2Gbps per lane, which is double that of the previous UFS 3.1,” Samsung claims. “That much bandwidth is ideal for 5G smartphones, which require massive amounts of data processing, and it is also expected to be used in future automotive applications, AR, and VR.”

The performance is also impressive, with a sequential read speed of up to 4,200MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 2,800MB/s promised. The previous generation, UFS 3.1, could promise write speeds of up to 1,200 MB/s. More than doubling the previous generation’s speed while using nearly half the power is likely to have a significant positive impact on device performance.

JEDEC, the Solid State Technology Association, an independent semiconductor engineering trade organization and standardization body, has approved the UFS 4.0 standard specification. Samsung says mass production of UFS 4.0 storage will begin in the third quarter of 2022, and that it is collaborating with smartphone and consumer device manufacturers from around the world to create an ecosystem of support for UFS 4.0 to make market adoption easier and faster.

Micron announced the industry’s first 3D NAND memory device with 232 layers on Thursday. The company intends to use its new 232-layer 3D NAND products for a variety of applications, including solid-state drives, and expects to begin mass production of such chips in late 2022.

Micron’s 232-layer 3D NAND device has a raw capacity of 1Tb and a 3D TLC architecture (128GB). The chip is based on Micron’s CMOS under array (CuA) architecture and stacks two arrays of 3D NAND on top of each other using the NAND string stacking technique.

The CuA design, combined with 232 layers of NAND, will significantly reduce the die size of Micron’s 1Tb 3D TLC NAND memory, allowing Micron to price devices featuring these chips more aggressively or simply increase its margins.

Micron did not specify I/O speeds or the number of planes in its new 232L 3D TLC NAND IC, but it did state that the new memory will outperform existing 3D NAND devices, which will be especially useful for next-generation SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 interface.

Speaking of SSDs, Micron’s executive vice president of technology and products, Scott DeBoer, stated that the company has worked closely with developers of in-house and third-party NAND controllers (for SSDs and other NAND-based storage devices) to ensure proper support for the new type of memory (and make sure those upcoming drives end up in our best SSDs list).

“We optimized [232-layer 3D NAND] technology around what we need to make the world’s fastest managed NAND and both datacenter and client SSD products,” said DeBoer. “The combination of controllers, both internal and external, has been a strong element of our vertical product integration focus to ensure that we have optimized NAND and controller technology for what we need to deliver future leadership products.”

Among the benefits of its 232-layer 3D TLC NAND are Micron mentioned lower power consumption compared to previous-generation nodes, which will be another advantage given Micron’s historical focus on mobile applications and relationships with device makers.

Given that Micron will begin production of 232-layer 3D TLC NAND devices in late calendar 2022, we can expect SSDs powered by the new memory to arrive in 2023.

3D NAND was developed in response to the scaling limitations of 2D NAND memory.

The layers in 3D NAND were flipped from horizontal to vertical orientation and strings of them were built to form a tower. By changing the direction of how the cells are configured created opportunity to increase storage capacity, reduce size of the storage area and reduce the power consumption to access the cells.

Honestly, it’s a complicated explanation to describe the changes between 2D and 3D NAND, but we found this awesome video from TechTarget. The video is very direct and to the point without over complicated explanations. Please watch it. 2min 20 seconds long.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) has announced the availability of a sample of the world’s first vertically-integrated 176-layer NAND solid-state drive (SSD) for data center applications. This new data center SSD features Micron’s industry-leading NAND with 176 layers of storage cells and proven CMOS-under-the-array technology for an ultra-efficient design.

Last year, organizations that used high encryption standards for data at rest and in motion paid 29.4 percent less for a data breach than organizations that used low or no standard encryption. Micron SSDs include self-encrypting drive functionality and Microsoft eDrive options to help protect against data breaches and tailor security to specific data protection needs.

Nexcopy Introduces an Ultra-Fast 16-Target SD Card Duplicator with Advanced CID Capabilities

The latest innovation from Nexcopy, the 16-target SD Card Duplicator, redefines efficiency by allowing users to copy 1GB of data every 30 seconds. With its enhanced copy speeds, this cutting-edge device is a key product for those needing to perform Secure Digital duplication.

Manufactured by Nexcopy Inc., a Southern California based technology company, the SD160PC sets a new standard for SD Card Duplicators. Designed to connect to a computer, this device works with Nexcopy’s exclusive Drive Manager software. The platform offers a comprehensive array of features, enabling users to execute even the most intricate data duplication projects with ease.

Key features of the SD Card Duplicator:

• Rapid duplication of 1GB of data to all sockets every 30 seconds.
• Ability to read CID numbers from Secure Digital cards for enhanced security.
• Drive Manager software with six copy modes to suit diverse requirements.
• Support for any file format, with compatibility dependent on the copy mode.
• Password-controlled Admin area to manage access between supervisors and operators.

A standout capability of the SD160PC is its ability to read CID numbers from Secure Digital media. The CID number, a unique identifier stored in read-only memory, strengthens encrypted content deployment. Nexcopy makes it easy to download and export these values to a .csv file for analysis or record keeping.

Nexcopy also provides a live speed test video on the product page, demonstrating the remarkable copy speed and efficiency of the system. Prospective users can see firsthand the duplicator’s performance.

The SD160PC is available now for direct purchase from Nexcopy or through authorized resellers worldwide. Whether for commercial duplication or secure data management, the SD160PC delivers speed, reliability, and top-tier functionality.

UPDATE:

Since this press release from March 2022, Nexcopy has updated its software to support the writing of CID numbers to SD cards, in addition to reading them. While writing CID values is not universally supported, Nexcopy offers Secure Digital media specifically designed for this process, providing a turnkey solution where required.

What is a CID number?

The CID (Card Identification) of an SD card is a unique identifier embedded in read-only memory by the manufacturer. It typically contains the manufacturer ID, production date, and proprietary details. The value is accessible only through specialized hardware or commands, such as those used by the SD160PC duplicator.

CID numbers are hidden from standard users but can be accessed programmatically for applications like device authentication, data encryption, and asset tracking. Some management software also supports exporting these identifiers for administrative use.

The 16-target SD Card Duplicator represents a leap forward in duplication technology. With lightning-fast performance, robust software, and enhanced security measures, it stands as the industry benchmark for Secure Digital duplication.

Nexcopy announced this SD Card Duplicator release through PRLeap on March 30, 2022.

For the purpose of this article we are explaining the difference between “disc” and “disk” in relationship to the terms applied to technology products.

The term “disc” is most often referred to data storage in the form of optical media.

The term “disk” is most often referred to data storage in the form of hard drive or solid state drive media.

It is also said the spelling “disc” is more commonly used in Europe to describe data storage products; whereas the spelling “disk” is more commonly used in the United States.

From our understanding the origins of “disk” to describe data storage is rooted from the floppy diskette days. Users, resellers and manufacturers would shorten the word “diskette” to simply use the word “disk.” ( ref )

Once optical media such as CD and CD-R came to market the term “disc” was used to describe the product because of the product shape. The Latin word “discus” is used by the Greeks to describe “dikein” which is “to throw” and to throw and object which was flat and round.

As the years past with CD and CD-R and then DVD and DVD-R it came even more common for technology users, resellers and manufacturers to use the spelling “disc” to describe their optical media products.

Here at GetFlashMemory.info we see many versions of the spelling when describing a USB flash drive or disk. The correct spelling when related to a USB flash drive would be “USB disk.” This is true because the data storage device does not have a physical shape which is round.

About one year ago, we did report on a USB flash drive which emulates CD-ROM optical media when connected to computers, called the Disc License drive. In this situation the spelling for “disc” is correct because the product emulates that of a circular optical drive. This product is a WORM device (Write Once Read Many) which means the data on the USB drive cannot be modified, changed, manipulated or deleted.