SK hynix Inc. and Sandisk begin HBF standardization under OCP

SK hynix Inc. and Sandisk held a kick-off event at Sandisk’s Milpitas headquarters to begin a global effort to standardize a next-generation memory solution called High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) intended for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) inference Edge Resource Allocator (ERA).

The companies framed the effort against a recent shift from model training toward inference and argued that increasing numbers of users created a need for faster, more power-efficient memory at scale; the press release said existing memory structures could not satisfy both high capacity and power efficiency simultaneously in the inference stage.

The release described Host-Based Firewall (HBF) as a memory layer positioned between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and solid-state drives (SSD), designed to bridge HBM’s high performance and Solid-State Drive (SSD)’s high capacity while allowing capacity expansion and power efficiency; HBM was identified as handling high bandwidth with HBF serving as a supporting architectural layer.

SK hynix Inc. and Sandisk outlined a joint workstream under the Open Compute Project (OCP) to pursue standardization, and said they would advance standardization and commercialization efforts drawing on their design, packaging and mass production experience in HBM and NAND.

SK hynix said, “By making HBF an industry standard, together with Sandisk, we will lay the foundation for the entire AI ecosystem to grow together. A dedicated workstream under OCP[1] will be launched with Sandisk to begin standardization work.” “The key to AI infrastructure is to go beyond the performance competition of individual technologies and to optimize the entire ecosystem,” said Ahn Hyun, President and Chief Development Officer. “Through HBF technology standardization the company will establish a cooperative system and present an AI-era optimized memory architecture to create new value for customers and partners.”

The press release said the industry forecasts that demand for complex memory solutions, including HBF, will pick up around 2030.