Tuxera Empowers OEMs to Navigate Rising NAND Costs and Tightening Supply

Tuxera launched a new flash cost calculator to help OEMs identify potential savings and explore alternative storage strategies as changing flash market conditions put growing pressure on product costs.

Gartner forecasts NAND flash prices to rise 234% in 2026, with meaningful pricing relief not expected until late 2027. For manufacturers of automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and Zone Control Units (ZCUs), smart meters, industrial equipment and medical devices, the impact comes not only from higher flash prices but from the capacity options available to them.

A product may only require 4GB of storage, but manufacturers can face increasingly limited choice at lower eMMC capacities. If the capacity required is no longer available, they may be forced to move to a higher-capacity alternative, potentially paying for far more storage than the product actually needs. The pressure is likely to increase as the growth of Edge AI and Physical AI places greater demands on the storage and data infrastructure within devices.

Tuxera helps OEMs address these pressures by giving them greater flexibility in how embedded storage is designed and managed. Its FlashFX Tera software enables OEMs to move from managed flash such as eMMC to raw NAND. This gives manufacturers greater choice over components, capacities and suppliers while maintaining the reliability required for long-lived embedded systems. For memory vendors, FlashFX Tera can also provide a way to complement managed flash offerings with feature-rich solutions to raw flash for embedded applications.

By moving flash management into software, OEMs can gain greater control over storage cost, capacity, and sourcing, helping them to:

• Reduce component costs by selecting flash capacity closer to what the product actually requires, rather than paying for oversized managed components
• Increase sourcing flexibility by opening up a wider choice of supported raw flash parts and vendors, reducing dependence on a single component roadmap
• Respond more easily to component shortages and end-of-life by allowing alternative supported flash parts to be introduced under the same software architecture
• Make every gigabyte work harder through software-based wear levelling that distributes data writes across the memory, helping prevent individual areas from wearing out prematurely and extending usable flash lifetime. As memory becomes more expensive, getting more from the flash already in the device can deliver greater economic value
• Maintain reliable data storage and optimize performance through data integrity, error correction, and bad-block management capabilities, with flash management tailored to the requirements of the application

“Manufacturers cannot control NAND prices, component availability or suppliers’ product roadmaps, but they can build greater flexibility into how they use flash,” said Steffan Schumacher, CEO, Tuxera. “Much of the industry conversation has focused on supply constraints and component prices. The more important question is what engineers can do in response. The opportunity is not simply to source a cheaper component today, but to design storage architectures that use flash more efficiently and give manufacturers more choice when costs, availability and technology inevitably change again.”

The new flash Cost Calculator makes the potential financial impact easier to assess. Manufacturers can enter their required capacity, annual production volumes, and production lifetime to estimate potential savings from moving from managed flash to right-sized raw flash. They can also enter their own supplier pricing to reflect their individual purchasing agreements.

The Tuxera flash cost calculator is available here.