SK hynix announced on the 4th that it has unveiled, together with U.S. NAND flash memory company SanDisk, the first standard specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a next-generation storage technology. This is the first outcome released about six months after the launch in February of this year of the HBF standardization consortium led by the two companies. Major AI companies such as Google and Tenstorrent are also participating in the consortium.

HBF is a new memory technology that has characteristics between DRAM (volatile memory)-based High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and NAND (non-volatile memory)-based high-speed storage devices (SSD). As the volume of data to be processed in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is growing rapidly, it is drawing attention as a technology that can simultaneously achieve both speed and capacity.

According to the newly announced HBF standard specification, capacity is divided into two configurations by stacking NAND in 8 and 16 layers, and can be set up to 512GB (gigabytes). Bandwidth (data processing speed) is divided into three grades (Grade 1–3), and defined in a range from 0.4TB (terabytes) per second to 3.0TB per second. SK hynix stressed in particular that this HBF standard applies an “open” interface so that it can be flexibly connected and used with heterogeneous processors such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs).

Based on the HBF standard specification, SK hynix plans to accelerate ecosystem building by expanding HBF adoption in the AI storage market and enhancing the technological maturity. The HBF standard was announced to coincide with the opening of “FMS (Future of Memory and Storage) 2026,” the world’s largest flash memory conference, held August 4–6 (local time) at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, United States. SK hynix plans to present HBF at the event as a core technology to resolve memory bottlenecks in the AI era.

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