Lee Seok-hee, President of SK Hynix, "600-layer NAND Flash stacking possible with platform innovation"

Lee Seok-hee, President of SK Hynix, is delivering the keynote speech at the IEEE International Reliability Symposium (IRPS2021) on the 22nd. (Photo by SK Hynix YouTube capture)

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] "Looking ahead to the next 10 years, DRAM is expected to face platform change challenges to realize technology below 10㎚ (nanometer, one billionth of a meter), and NAND will aim for technology exceeding 600 layers. SK Hynix will overcome this through platform innovation."

Lee Seok-hee, President of SK Hynix, expressed confidence in his keynote speech at the IEEE International Reliability Symposium (IRPS2021) on the 22nd. He emphasized that following the success of developing the industry's highest 176-layer 4D NAND flash last December, the company is accelerating technology development through innovations in materials and structures for technological evolution and solving reliability issues.

At the event, President Lee shared SK Group's overall ‘Financial Story’ focus for this year and mentioned that three values?technology, society, and era?will drive semiconductor technology advancement. He referred to SK Hynix's management strategy aligned with the era of digital transformation. He stated, "‘Technical value’ means responding to industry and customer demands by innovating materials and structures for DRAM and NAND technology evolution and solving reliability issues," and explained that SK Hynix is improving this through related technology development and the introduction of new processes.

SK Hynix is concentrating on expanding its NAND flash business. To improve the sales structure of 80% DRAM and 20% NAND flash, the company is focusing on technology development. The 176-layer product developed last year is planned for mass production within the year, and the share of 128-layer NAND will also be expanded to over 50% within the first half. The acquisition of Intel's NAND flash business division is also in its final stages.

In his keynote speech, President Lee also emphasized contributing to solving social issues such as energy and environment for ‘social value.’ He cited solid-state drives (SSD) as a representative case where social value in the environmental field can be created through technological competitiveness, stating that replacing the representative storage device, hard disk drives (HDD), with low-power SSDs can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 93%. Regarding ‘era value,’ he said, "It will evolve into a new ICT era where all devices are integrated based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology," and added, "Memory semiconductors will develop in a direction where memory and logic (processing units) are integrated to overcome performance limits."

President Lee stated, "I believe the semiconductor industry needs a major transformation," and emphasized, "In the past, we solved issues of technological completeness and productivity under vertical relationships with key partners, but now we must establish cooperative partnerships with various partners."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.