Culture & People

The Innovators: Jet Woo Discusses What Drives his Work at SK hynix

By January 23, 2020 September 23rd, 2020 No Comments

In its soon-to-be-announced video series called “The Innovators,” SK hynix will look to highlight its employees who are helping to deliver the next generation of technology that will impact the industry and the world. The first episode looks at SK hynix America employee Jet Woo, who discusses his passions and what drives his work on a daily basis.

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Jet Woo, Director of NAND Technical Marketing for SK hynix America, has spent his career with an insatiable curiosity for new technologies and how these products help to improve everyday life. Based in San Jose, he has been with SK hynix for 8 years, starting as a Technical Marketing Manager and climbing his way to a director level. In his role at SK hynix, he takes pride in working with cross-functional teams to make sure that products are successful—helping to launch them into the market.

While SK hynix has been providing top-tier SSDs for PC OEMs, server and data center customers many years, the company has recently expanded its focus to provide these products to consumers in order to meet their complex needs. Jet Woo has also played a vital role in this transition with the recent announcements of the Gold S31 SSD in August 2019 as well as Gold P31 SSDs, which were introduced at CES 2020.

Take a look below for a sneak peek at the upcoming Innovators series with five fast takeaways from Jet Woo:

1. I started my career as an engineer back in the early 2000’s.

Since I started my career, I have been focusing on NAND flash technology. At that time there were not many applications around NAND flash technology, back when you could get a USB thumb-drive in megabyte capacity for a very expensive price. The reason I made the switch from engineering to a technical marketing role was because of my own interests and curiosities on how the applications were being used in the field. I find it’s really an ideal position for me, because I get to leverage my engineering background for the fundamentals and, at the same time, I get to be involved in an innovative way every day, working with my customers, my partners, and industry leaders.

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2. Travel helps to be open-minded and adaptable to new things.

Traveling around to experience new cultures and seeing how different people live their everyday lives really open up new and interesting ways to see opportunities on how technology can improve lives all over the world. As SK hynix continues to expand globally, it is important to recognize and understand many different cultures. Overall, traveling gives me a fresh perspective on how I manage my work and, more importantly, provides a valuable family bonding time.

3. People often don’t realize how much they demand from their storage devices.

It is a common problem that people are running out of storage on their laptops or smartphones because many are capturing everything they see. It began with pictures and images, but it is moving to videos with the increased popularity of certain social apps. Basically everything needs memory and storage these days, whether you’re talking about your edge devices or edge computing. And not only is so much data being generated by every individual user, but in the near future, we’re going to see tons of data being generated and processed by sensors and smart devices all around us.

4. The biggest challenge for the industry is the amount of data being generated.

We are already in the era of big data. The number of devices collecting and storing data is increasing exponentially. So, everyone in the industry right now is working on how we come up with a way to process the data quickly and efficiently. SK hynix, as one of the top players in the industry, is working aggressively with our partners to tackle this issue with technology innovations. Working at SK hynix with the most brilliant people in the industry is what excites me and drives my work.

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5. In 2020, there’s going to be many more flash-based applications.

Although SK hynix is a semiconductor company, we are more than just one of the storage device providers. We like to see the bigger picture within our initiative and innovation by reducing power consumption, providing high performance, and powering all the new applications in several key industries including machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR), Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, big data, and 5G. SK hynix will continue to be an industry leader and a product expert of NAND flash memory. We work with our customers and partners to define the future.