November 22, 2024

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SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung speaks at the SK AI Summit 2024 in Seoul on Monday. (SK hynix)

SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung unveiled the company’s plan to start mass production of the industry's most up-to-date high-bandwidth memory chips early next year.

“We anticipated that the market for the 16-layer product will begin to open (the sixth-generation) HBM4,” he said in a keynote speech at SK AI Summit 2024 in Seoul on Monday. "We are developing the new product to ensure technical stability.”

The 16-layer, 48-gigabyte, fifth-generation HBM3E chip boasts the largest capacity and highest number of the stack, according to Kwak.

Citing internal simulations, he added that the 16-layer product's training performance and inference performance are 18 percent and 32 percent better than the current 12-layer chip, respectively.

Kwak also said that the chipmaker will continue using the advanced packaging technology MR-MUF, which cuts down on energy, for the new chip and it is developing hybrid bonding as a backup plan.

SK hynix began supplying the industry’s first eight-layer HBM3E product to US chip giant Nvidia in March, and started mass production of the 12-layer HBM3E chip last month, aiming for shipments in the fourth quarter.

Following this, the company plans to supply the 16-layer HBM3E product in the first half of next year and introduce a 12-layer HBM4 chip in the latter half.

The CEO further stressed the company’s plans to introduce logic processes to the base die starting from HBM4, leveraging a “one-team partnership” with Taiwanese chip giant TSMC to deliver highly competitive products to customers.

SK hynix currently holds over 53 percent of the HBM market share, significantly ahead of its rivals Samsung Electronics (38 percent) and US-based chipmaker Micron Technology (9 percent).

The company aims to further solidify its market leadership by continuously releasing new HBM products, including HBM5 and HBM5E chips starting in 2028.

By Jie Ye-eun (yeeun@heraldcorp.com)