SK hynix Inc. and Sandisk Corp. held the HBF Spec. Standardization Consortium Kick-Off’ event at Sandisk Headquarters in Milpitas, California on the February 25, announcing global standardization strategy of next-generation memory solution HBF (High Bandwidth Flash) aimed at the AI inference era.

According to SK hynix, making HBF an industry standard, together with Sandisk, will lay the foundation for growth of the entire AI ecosystem. The company said a dedicated workstream under the Open Compute Project (OCP) will be launched with Sandisk to begin standardization work.

Recently, the AI industry is shifting from training which focuses on creating Large Language Models (LLMs) to inference, which accelerates actual AI services to users.

Fast and efficient memory is essential as the number of users using AI services increases rapidly. However, the existing memory structure cannot meet the high capacity data processing and power efficiency at the same time in the inference stage and HBF technology is designed to address these limitations.

HBF technology is a new memory layer between ultra-fast memory, HBM and high-capacity storage device, SSD. HBF technology can fill the gap between HBM’s high performance and SSD’s high capacity and ensure both capacity expansion and power efficiency required for AI inferencing. While HBM handles the high level bandwidth, HBF technology serves as a supporting layer in the architecture.

In particular, HBF technology is expected to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) while increasing the scalability of AI systems. The industry forecasts that the demand of complex memory solutions, including HBF, will pick up around 2030.

In the AI inference market, the role of a total memory solution company that can provide both HBM and HBF is becoming more important as system level optimization of CPU, GPU, and memory determines the overall competitiveness rather than the performance of a single chip.

In line with this, SK hynix and Sandisk are proactively pursuing HBF solution’s standardization and commercialization based on their design, packaging and mass production experience in HBM and NAND.

“The key to AI infrastructure is to go beyond the performance competition of individual technologies and to optimize the entire ecosystem,” said Ahn Hyun, President and Chief Development Officer, SK hynix. “Through HBF technology standardization the company will establish a cooperative system and present an AI-era optimized memory architecture to create new value for customers and partners.”

By: DocMemory
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