Park Jung-ho, vice chairman of SK Hynix's CEO, gave a keynote speech on the theme of "AI Era, The Way for Korean Semiconductor to Move forward" at an academic symposium commemorating the opening of Hallym University's Doheon Academy at Gwanghwamun Press Center in Seoul on February 15.
Vice Chairman Park stressed, "Memory semiconductors will always be at the center of technological innovation that will occur in the AI era."
He said, "IT technology has constantly developed with the times and enriched our lives," adding, "In the past, the PC era has brought about the information revolution, and the mobile era has accelerated the information revolution."
"The cloud era played a big role in companies running their business efficiently and commercializing new ideas," he said.
"As the AI era unfolds, challenges that have not been solved in the past will be solved, and innovative products and services will be born in autonomous vehicles, robots, and bio fields, our lives will change completely," he said. "It is memory semiconductors that have created invisible innovations at the center of the change."
"Many big tech companies are jumping into AI chatbot services, starting with the interactive artificial intelligence ChatGPT, which is the center of the recent issue," Vice Chairman Park said. "In the future, there is a possibility that this field will become a new killer application of semiconductor demand."
"As the AI era such as ChatGPT unfolds and related technologies evolve, global data generation, storage, and throughput are expected to increase exponentially," he said. "In this trend, HBM, the world's first high-speed DRAM developed by SK Hynix, is playing a major role in the evolution of technology in the AI era."
SK Hynix has the best competitiveness by mass-producing HBM3 for the first time in the world and supplying it to Nvidia. In the HBM2E and HBM3, the company leads the industry with the largest market share gap.
HBM3, the latest generation of HBM, is considered the best product in the high-speed AI semiconductor market as it has a data processing speed of 819GB per second.
In his proposal to maintain the value of the memory industry and the competitiveness of Korean semiconductors, Vice Chairman Park said, "Semiconductors are Korea's No. 1 export item for more than 20 years, and the number of industrial workers is estimated to be 310,000," adding, "Korea's global memory market share is overwhelming with 62%. As such, it is a key industry that should be strengthened at the national level."
"If D-RAM for servers around the world is converted from DDR4 to DDR5, we can reduce the cumulative power of 29.2 TWh (terawatt-hour) from 2022 to 2030, which is estimated to have the effect of reducing about 11.67 million tons of greenhouse gases," Vice Chairman Park stressed. "Korean semiconductors should contribute to the Earth and humanity by developing high-efficiency/high-performance products, and seek a virtuous cycle in which this leadership leads to strengthening industry competitiveness again."
