Lee Seok-hee, CEO of SK Hynix, said, "In the future, DRAM will enter the process of less than 10 nanometers, and NAND flash will be able to stack more than 600 layers."
Suggesting the outlook for the next 10 years, he said, "SK Hynix will realize this through platform innovation." Currently, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics are in the process of '10 nano 3rd generation' for memory semiconductors.
CEO Lee made the remarks in a keynote speech at International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on March 22. In January, CEO Lee won the Excellent Leader Award at the Consumer Technology Society (CTSoc) under IEEE.
IRPS, an academic event organized by IEEE, is an international conference where engineers and scientists from various technology fields, including semiconductors, participate and share research results.
It was held as an online event under the theme of "The Journey of Memory Semiconductor Technology to the Future ICT World."
"SK Hynix succeeded in developing 176-layer 4D NAND flash in December last year," CEO Lee said at the event, sharing the "Financial Story" that the entire SK Group is focusing on this year as SK Hynix's management strategy in response to the era of digital transformation.
"We will lead the development of semiconductor technology based on three values: technology, society, and the era," he said. "We want to meet the needs of the industry and customers by solving materials and structures for DRAM and NAND technology."
The CEO added, "SK Hynix is improving this by developing related technologies and introducing new processes."
Currently, SK Hynix is focusing on expanding its NAND flash business and developing technologies to improve its sales structure of 80% DRAM and 20% NAND flash.
To this end, it is planning to mass-produce 176-layer products by end of this year and increase the portion of 128-layer NAND to more than 50% within the first half of this year. It seems that its acquisition of Intel's NAND flash business will be completed soon.
In addition, Lee stressed that he will contribute to solving social problems such as energy and the environment in order to realize "social values."
Referring to Solid State Drive (SSD) as a representative example that can create social value in the environment through technology competitiveness, he said, "If we replace the representative storage device, Hard Disk Drive (HDD), with low-power SSDs, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 93%."
"By 2030, we can reduce 41 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions by replacing HDDs in all data centers around the world with low-power SSDs," he said. "We will continue to introduce new solutions that improve computing performance while significantly reducing energy consumption."
