At the Future of Memory and Storage Conference on August 4, 2026, Microchip Technology and Micron Technology jointly demonstrated a full end-to-end PCIe Gen 6 storage architecture, combining Micron’s 9650 NVMe SSDs with Microchip’s Switchtec Gen 6 PCIe fanout switches. The result is a system where multiple SSDs can all run simultaneously at full Gen 6 speeds, rather than sharing a constrained bus.
What Gen 6 actually means in practice
PCIe Gen 6 doubles the transfer rate of its predecessor to 64 gigatransfers per second per lane.
Micron’s 9650 SSD is the first PCIe Gen 6 data center SSD to reach mass production, and it demonstrates sequential read speeds of up to roughly 28 GB/s.
The Microchip Switchtec Gen 6 switches support up to 160 lanes. They are built on a 3 nm process. The switches also include hardware root of trust, advanced error containment, multicast support, and CNSA 2.0 post-quantum-safe cryptography.
