Kim Hyung-soo, Hynix Vice President: "The Era of Customized DRAM for Customers"

27th Korean Academy of Engineering Young Engineer Award Recipient
SK Hynix DRAM Development Vice President Kim Hyungsoo

"Customizing (optimizing for specific customers) that solves customers' needs and problems while maintaining versatility is important."

Kim Hyungsoo, Vice President of DRAM Development at SK Hynix, received the ‘Young Engineer Award’ at the 27th Korean Academy of Engineering Awards Ceremony. In an interview posted on the SK Hynix Newsroom on the 23rd, Vice President Kim answered about the future direction of DRAM technology development and SK Hynix’s strategy as follows. He explained, "As the technical difficulty increases, the cost of implementing new technologies inevitably rises. We need to solve customers’ 'pain points.' Current DDR5, LPDDR5, HBM3, and GDDR6 were also developed optimized for each customer according to their usage, and such differentiation will be increasingly demanded in the future."

Memory semiconductor companies, including SK Hynix, have maintained the paradigm of ‘small variety, mass production.’ Although it is difficult to change this paradigm in a short period, they are transforming into an agile structure that can quickly customize according to customers’ changing demands.

Vice President Kim joined SK Hynix as a design researcher in 2005 after completing his doctoral course at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and has led DRAM product development. He was selected as the recipient of the 27th Korean Academy of Engineering Young Engineer Award in recognition of his contributions to the development of the Korean semiconductor industry, having earned the title of ‘world’s first technology development’ multiple times.

His representative achievement is the world’s first development of the 1ynm 16Gb DDR5 DRAM in 2018 (the world’s first DDR5 DRAM applying the second-generation 10nm-class (1y) technology). This product was developed with specifications that are 1.8 times faster in speed and 30% lower in power consumption compared to the previous generation DDR4 DRAM. In 2021, he developed the industry’s largest capacity single chip 1anm 24Gb DDR5 DRAM (DRAM applying 10nm 4th generation (1a) technology) and the world’s highest performance DRAM, the HBM (a product that vertically stacks multiple DRAM chips to dramatically increase data processing speed compared to conventional DRAM) series, and in 2022, developed high-capacity 96GB CXL (a next-generation PCIe-based interface protocol designed to use CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, and memory more efficiently) memory.

Vice President Kim said, "The products we developed first in the world and are actively used in the market recently are DDR5 and HBM3," adding, "DDR5 is a product that is faster and consumes less power compared to the previous generation DDR4, and SK Hynix was the first among memory companies to develop it, securing market leadership." He continued, "HBM3, which has become an indispensable solution with the advancement of artificial intelligence, is also a product that SK Hynix developed first in the world by consolidating our best technology."

He stated, "As various services that connect the world as one, including artificial intelligence, rapidly develop, the role of data centers has grown, and the server market for data centers continues to expand. Since DRAM plays a key role in servers, its performance must rapidly evolve to match servers. Against this background, DDR5 was developed to meet the market demand for processing more information faster with less power. The industry expects DDR4 to be rapidly replaced by DDR5 in the future," he added.

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