SK Hynix looks to expand AI memory leadership with new NAND chip

South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc. aims to expand its memory leadership in the artificial intelligence sphere beyond the high-performance DRAM segment into NAND flash storage devices with a new mobile chip called ZUFS 4.0.

SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker after Samsung Electronics Co., said on Thursday it has developed ZUFS 4.0, or zoned universal flash storage 4.0, a NAND flash suited for mobile applications.

The company said the new NAND flash product is the industry’s “best of its kind” as it significantly improves data management efficiency by classifying and storing data used for the same or similar purposes in the same zone.

By doing so, the product considerably boosts the speed of a smartphone’s operating system, it said.

SK Hynix said the ZUFS shortens the time required to run an application on a mobile device by 45% compared with conventional UFS devices and extends the product’s lifetime by 40% with its significantly improved read and write performance.

The company said it began the NAND chip development process in 2019 together with a global platform client, before the arrival of the AI boom, in anticipation of a rise in demand for high-performance NAND products.

“We expect the latest product to help expand our AI memory leadership to the NAND space, extending our success in the high-performance DRAM represented by HBM,” it said in a statement.

MASS PRODUCTION IN Q3

SK Hynix said the 4.0 product qualifies the specifications by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), the semiconductor industry’s standardization body.

The chipmaker plans to begin mass production of the latest NAND in the third quarter to supply the product to makers of various on-device AI smartphones.

“Customers are requiring better memory options as big tech companies focus on the development of on-device products using their own generative AI applications. We’ll continue to supply high-performance NAND solutions that meet higher requirements at the right time,” said Ahn Hyun, head of SK Hynix’s N-S Committee, a unit that supports the chipmaker’s NAND flash business.

SK Hynix is the dominant player in the HBM or advanced high bandwidth memory segment, controlling over 70% of the market globally.

HBM has become an essential part of the AI boom, as it provides much faster processing speed than traditional memory chips.

Write to Eui-Myung Park at uimyung@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.