Nam Hyun-woo has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2013, mostly covering business and politics. He currently belongs to the Business Desk where he covers topics such as emerging tech, AI, ICT and Korea's chaebol community. Prior to joining the team, he was the paper's correspondent for the presidential office of Korea during the Yoon Suk Yeol and Moon Jae-in administrations.
SK hynix, Sandisk kick off standardization of HBF
SK hynix's Icheon Campus in Gyeonggi Province / Courtesy of SK hynix
By Nam Hyun-woo
SK hynix and Sandisk have teamed up for the global standardization of high-bandwidth flash (HBF), which is viewed as a new breakthrough for advancing artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators.
SK hynix said Thursday it hosted a kick-off event for the HBF Spec Standardization Consortium at flash memory giant Sandisk’s headquarters in Milpitas, California.
The two sides will set up a dedicated team to work on HBF standardization under the Open Compute Project, the world’s largest organization for sharing data center product designs and industry practices.
“Together with Sandisk, we will establish HBF as an industry standard and build a foundation for the entire AI ecosystem to grow together,” SK hynix said.
HBF is a next-generation flash memory chip architecture for high-performance storage that will be critical for AI inference.
Memory, mostly DRAM chips such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM), serves as a fast, temporary and volatile workspace for active data and applications. Storage, largely based on NAND flash memory including solid-state drives (SSDs), functions as a non-volatile repository, retaining files and apps at larger capacity but slower speeds.
The importance of NAND flash has been rising rapidly in AI accelerators, as AI services increasingly shift toward inference, which requires fast and frequent access to large volumes of stored data to deliver real-time results.
SK hynix said HBF will be positioned between HBM and SSDs, bridging the gap between HBM’s fast performance and SSDs’ storage capacity, securing both scalability and power efficiency required for AI inference. By deploying HBF, data center operators are expected to reduce total cost of ownership.
Industry officials anticipate HBF could be commercialized in late 2027 or early 2028, while the demand for comprehensive memory solutions that includes HBM and HBF will fully expand around 2030.
SK hynix said it will push ahead with the standardization and commercialization of HBF along with Sandisk.
“Through HBF standardization, we will establish a cooperative framework and create new value by presenting an optimized memory architecture for customers and partners in the AI era,” SK hynix Chief Development Officer Ahn Hyun said.