SK海力士在FMS披露HBF规格标准，但商业化仍偏远且核心催化已多次公开

SK hynix (000660.KS) has become the industry's first to unveil a standard specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a new memory technology following High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), moving to secure an early lead in the ecosystem. As the volume of data to be processed by artificial intelligence (AI) chips surges, NAND, which was once simply storage, is expected to evolve into so-called "AI storage" that boosts speed to support computation, much like HBM.
SK hynix took part in "Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2026," a global memory technology exhibition that opened on the 4th at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, and jointly unveiled the first HBF standard specification with SanDisk. The result comes six months after the two companies formed the "HBF Spec Standardization Consortium" and began their cooperation in February this year.
SK hynix set the HBF standard specification with configurations spanning two types, 8-layer and 16-layer, capacities of up to 512GB, and three grades of bandwidth—corresponding to the width of the road on which data travels—ranging from 0.4 to 3TB per second. Compared with the HBM4E (64GB, 4TB per second) set to be released next year, this offers eight times the capacity while maintaining up to 75% of the speed.
HBF is a new storage device that stacks NAND in multiple layers, just as HBM stacks DRAM in multiple layers. By having multiple layers of NAND operate simultaneously, it widens bandwidth and compensates for the slow operating speed that has been a weakness of conventional NAND. Through this, it can be placed alongside HBM within an AI accelerator to support computation. As AI data surges and HBM capacity of tens of gigabytes becomes difficult to handle, HBF—which simultaneously provides greater capacity of hundreds of gigabytes and relatively high speed—has emerged as a solution.
The industry expects HBF to be commercialized around 2030. For SK hynix to seize the market, it must go beyond mere development and align product standards and specifications in advance, cooperating technically ahead of time with materials, parts and equipment companies as well as with big tech firms that are the actual buyers. In particular, because big tech firms often use memory products from multiple manufacturers together in a single chip system, standardization across manufacturers is also important.
SK hynix plans to spread this standard specification across the industry through the HBF consortium, which includes AI accelerator developers such as Google and Tenstorrent. Kim Cheon-seong, head of SK hynix's Solution Development division, who delivered a keynote speech on HBF at FMS, said, "Through HBF, we will contribute to implementing a new architecture (design structure) that expands the boundary between memory and storage and improves the efficiency of the overall system." SK hynix also unveiled for the first time its 10th-generation (V10) 375-layer 4D NAND wafer and products.
Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) is also known to have revealed at the exhibition its plan to release a new "Z-NAND" product that raises operating speed compared with conventional NAND, and to have displayed a model at its booth. It marks the unveiling of a successor eight years after the product's launch in 2018. Z-NAND applies the single-level cell (SLC) method and high-speed connection technology. SLC can implement only 1 bit per cell, the basic unit that makes up a storage device, resulting in lower capacity, but its simple operating method allows for higher speed. Based on the 2018 product, it was five times faster than a solid-state drive (SSD), a conventional NAND device.