Solid State Hynix

SK Hynix’s operating income in The second quarter of this year kit the lowest in 13 quarters.
SK Hynix’s operating income in The second quarter of this year kit the lowest in 13 quarters.

 

SK Hynix will mass-produce ultra-fast solid state drives (SSDs) using Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) starting in Oct. The chipmaker, which has been lagging behind Samsung Electronics, Intel, and Toshiba in the SSD business, is likely to increase its competitiveness in the next-gen memory market like SSDs or High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), based on the full support of SK Group's Chairman Choi Tae-won, who recently got out of jail.

According to industry sources on Aug. 24, SK Hynix plans to mass produce PC300, a new NVMe-based M.2 SSD from Oct., and to supply the product to its customers. NVMe is an ultra-fast data transmission standard developed especially for SSDs to get the most out of their performance. So far, NVMe has mostly been used for servers, but the standard is apparently taking root in the laptop market this year, starting with Samsung.

SK Hynix's new SSD is a 512 GB NVMe-based M.2 SSD. Considering Samsung's success in the mass production of a new product with virtually the same specs for the first time in April of this year, SK Hynix's achievement indicates that the chipmaker, which has failed to have a presence in the SSD market, is now following Samsung's technology with a six month gap. Toshiba will be able to mass-produce NVMe-based M.2 SSDs late this year.

SK Hynix is also preparing to mass-produce second-gen HBM, a next-gen memory chip. The company already supplied first-gen HBM to AMD and Nvidia this year, and it is going to begin full-scale expansion of its second-gen HBM business next year. A source in the semiconductor industry said, "Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, has recently introduced embedded DRAM and 3D cross point memory, leading to a generational shift in memory chips. So, I think that the commercialization of HBM will speed up."

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