Samsung and Hynix Head to NAND Festival 'Flash Memory Summit'

Scheduled for July 8 in Santa Clara, USA
Keynote speeches and exhibition booths planned
Showcased NAND flash technology last year

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will actively participate in the Flash Memory Summit event held next month. Attention is focused on whether they will use this event as a stage to showcase the latest NAND technology and flaunt their flagship products, as they did last year.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will attend the 'Flash Memory Summit 2023' held from the 8th to the 10th of next month at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the United States. The Flash Memory Summit is the largest industry event related to flash memory, a type of memory semiconductor. Every year, not only NAND flash manufacturers, the representative product of flash memory, but also related companies and organizations participate to discuss the latest technologies and industry trends.

Choi Jin-hyuk, Vice President and Head of Memory Research at Samsung Electronics America, delivering the keynote speech at the 'Flash Memory Summit 2022' held in August last year / Photo by Samsung Electronics Semiconductor Newsroom

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will deliver keynote speeches again this year, following last year. They will also set up booths during the event to promote their latest products. Solidigm, a subsidiary of SK Hynix, will also conduct a keynote speech and booth exhibition. Solidigm showcases solid-state drives (SSD) that use flash memory to store large amounts of data. The booths of these companies are expected to be the largest in the exhibition hall, arranged side by side with Japan's Kioxia.

This year’s event will discuss not only trends in the memory semiconductor market but also server-related technology issues such as cloud and data centers. It will cover SSD trends related to the recently popular artificial intelligence (AI) and the emerging automotive market as a new application. Topics related to 3D NAND processes and memory technology will also be included. Additionally, discussions will cover chiplet technology (which integrates multiple semiconductors into one package), high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technology, and the semiconductor support law (CHIPS Act), a hot topic in the semiconductor industry.

SK Hynix booth set up at the 'Flash Memory Summit 2022' held in August last year / [Photo source=SK Hynix Newsroom]

The industry is paying close attention to what announcements Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will make at this year’s event. Last year, Samsung Electronics announced plans to mass-produce 8th generation V-NAND (estimated 236 layers) at this event. They also unveiled a next-generation interface (CXL)-based memory semantic SSD for AI applications. SK Hynix also shared for the first time at the event last year that it had succeeded in developing 238-layer 4D NAND.

Since then, Samsung Electronics began mass production of 8th generation V-NAND in November last year. SK Hynix started mass production of 238-layer NAND in May. The industry expects that the stacking competition, which is a layer count race in the NAND market, will intensify again this year. Competitors Japan’s Kioxia and the U.S.’s Western Digital plan to mass-produce 218-layer 3D NAND this year.

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