The memory bosses of Samsung and SK Hynix shared their respective company’s different strategies concerning high-bandwidth memory (HBM) at an industry show in Taiwan on Wednesday.
Samsung Memory Business President Lee Jung-Bae and SK Hynix President Juseon Kim made keynote addresses on Wednesday, sharing their different strategies during SEMICON Taiwan 2024 held at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, also known as TaiNEX, in the Asian country’s capital.
Both executives talked about AI and the associated memory technologies but what they touted as their strengths and strategies differed greatly.
Samsung’s Lee, in his address made earlier than Kim's, said there was a limit to how much increase in performance can be made in HBM with existing memory processes. To overcome this limit, the president stressed that these processes must be combined with logic technologies, something Samsung has with its foundry and system large-scale integration business units.
Lee’s statements imply that, as it does memory, foundry, and logic, which its rivals in memory, SK Hynix and Micron, don’t have, it has an advantage over them.
SK Hynix’s Kim fired back, highlighting that it was the industry’s first to begin supplying HBM3E 8H, or 8-stack HBM3E, early in the year. The president said the company will start production of HBM3E 12H this month.
Kim also touted SK Hynix’s collaboration with TSMC, its logic and foundry partner, and effectively a response to Samsung’s strategy.
The president said SK Hynix was development of HBM4 was going smoothly so that it can deliver them in time to its customer. Kim said the chip will have logic technologies applied to its base die for the first time and made in collaboration with TSMC as well as deliver the best performance to date.
Samsung’s Lee also said doing well in HBM was not sufficient in the AI age. Besides cloud-based AI, on-device AI development was also a must, he said. Chipmakers must offer a wide variety of memory in the AI age such as on-device AI solutions and large capacity storage, the president said.
Samsung showcased its on-device AI solutions during the event such as LPW, or LPDDR wide, which expands the number of I/O compared to conventional LPDDR for higher bandwidth. Another was LPCAMM2, or low power compression attached memory module. There was also LPDDR5X-PIM (processing in memory), where the memory itself handles some processing workload to reduce bottleneck.
SK Hynix also touted its own products that are ahead in generation to Samsung’s. Kim said an AI server requires four times the memory capacity of a conventional server and SK Hynix was supplying 256GB DIMM which had through-silicon-via technology applied for this demand. SK Hynix was also the only memory maker to manufacture quad-level cell (QLC) embedded solid state drives (SSD), he said, and plans to unveil a 120TB model. Its LPDDR5T also offers a speed of 9.6Gbs and is “optimized” for on-device AI applications, Kim also said.
SK Hynix acquired QLC eSSD technologies through its acquisition of Solidigm from Intel. Solidigm manufactures NAND using floating gate (FG) technology rather than charge trap flash (CTF). FG has an advantage over CTF in durability when it comes to saving multiple bits in a cell. Samsung just recently showcased its own QLC eSSD at Flash Memory Summit 2024 in Santa Clara last month. SK Hynix’s LPDDR5T was verified by Qualcomm ahead of Samsung’s.
It is unprecedented for president-level executives of Samsung and SK Hynix to compete in the open over memory technologies at a Taiwanese trade show, a senior executive of a South Korean chip company told TheElec. This likely has to do with the fact that Taiwanese companies and Taiwanese technology leaders are effectively leading the AI chip ecosystem, they said.
TSMC is a rival to Samsung but a partner to SK Hynix. Many companies taking part and opening booths in SEMICON Taiwan are doing so to strengthen their ties with TSMC.
During SEMICON Taiwan, SEMI CEO Ajit Manocha said the chip industry is "counting on Taiwan to play a big role" in AI that will drive global economic growth, and "Taiwan plays a major role" in high-tech areas of chip development.
Nicky Lu, executive director of the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association and CEO of Etron, also said that Taiwan’s chip export will reach over 25% worldwide market share this year and had a positive outlook.
Meanwhile, SEMICON Taiwan also showed that TSMC’s fab construction in the US was still very much a political controversy in Taiwan. Former TSMC chairman Mark Liu said on Tuesday during a local lecture at a meeting held by Taiwan’s Economic Development Commission that TSMC faced trouble in construction of Fab 21 in Arizona in the US. In response, Jaw Shaw-kong, the former chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation of China known for his pro-China stance, said the construction of the fab was caused by US pressure and to appease the US.
Taiwan Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo, who was asked on Jaw’s comments during SEMICON Taiwan, said TSMC was building the fab in the US because the country was at the center of the semiconductor market and that TSMC must be close to the market. Kuo said he believed that TSMC’s fab in the US will start production as scheduled.
