SK hynix Unlocks NAND Memory Potential with Innovative Products at FMS 2022

As NAND Flash memory celebrates its 35^th anniversary this year, SK hynix showed up to the party with new products to unveil at the annual Flash Memory Summit (FMS).

SK hynix joined the August 2-4 event at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, the first in-person FMS since 2019. In the event’s keynote and other sessions, company executives and project leaders discussed new products and the challenges that went into their development. Among the keynote speakers were SK hynix Executive Vice President and Head of NAND Development Jungdal Choi and Sanjay S. Talreja, senior vice president and general manager at US subsidiary Solidigm.

Image 1. SK hynix’s booth at FMS 2022, where attendees could experience the company’s latest products

In their keynote titled “Unlocking the Potential of Data – the New Paradigm of Storage”, the executives explained how innovative NAND technology is addressing the ever-growing need for “DataCosm”, the unique confluence of data, storage, and computing.

Transferring More Data, Faster: The World’s Most Advanced NAND

During the August 2 presentation, Choi unveiled the world’s first 238-layer 512Gb Triple-Level Cell (TLC) 4D NAND with plans to start mass production in the first half of 2023. What makes this latest product stand out is that it is simultaneously the most layered and smallest in area, in turn dramatically improving productivity, data transfer speed, and power efficiency.

Talreja also unveiled the world’s first working Penta-Level Cell (PLC) SSD with the ability to store five bits of data per memory cell, 25% more data in the same footprint compared to quad-level cell (QLC) SSDs. The company is now well-placed to grow in areas including modern workloads such as AI, machine learning and big data analytics; building out of 5G infrastructure and displacing hard disk drives, which still store more than 85% of all data center data.

Image 2. Jungdal Choi and Sanjay S. Talreja share the stage as they deliver their keynote speech

Collaboration for Memory for CXL & Next-Generation Storage

SK hynix’s Head of DRAM Product Planning Uksong Kang and Woosuk Chung, director of Storage SA, also introduced their achievements during technical seminars. During the MemVerge session on August 2, Kang announced development of the company’s first DDR5 DRAM-based Compute Express Link (CXL) samples. The new product redefines memory-as-a-service thanks to CXL memory’s bandwidth/capacity expansion, media differentiation, controller differentiation, and pooling. Kang also stressed the importance of industry collaboration to build CXL memory ecosystem.

Image 3. CXL sample in hand, Uksong Kang introduces the product during his sponsored session

Meanwhile, during his Thursday (August 4) session, Chung demonstrated a next-generation intelligent storage product and the world’s first ordered Key Value Store Computational Storage Device (KV-CSD) that improves write and read capabilities for high performance computing. Developed in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the now two-year partnership played an important role in the development of the product, with performance testing performed on LANL’s supercomputer.

Santosh Kumar, director of NAND technical marketing at SK hynix, joined moderator Paul Saffo from Stanford University and executives from other NAND companies in a roundtable discussion “NAND Flash and its Impact on the World” on August 4. The speakers discussed the impact NAND Flash has had on the world over the past 35 years, future applications of NAND Flash and the challenges that memory technologies continue to face.

Image 4. Santosh Kumar (second from the left) participates in the “NAND Flash and its Impact on the World” roundtable discussion

After a successful FMS 2022, SK hynix’s Choi hopes to leverage the momentum to develop more products that push the technology barrier. “We will continue innovations to find breakthroughs in technological challenges,” he said.