In this article, we are highlighting three young colleagues working in three different SK hynix offices in the world. With 32 offices around the globe, SK hynix is proud to offer employees the opportunity to experience different parts of the world while maintaining connections to their home country through their work.

Germany: At the cutting edge

With many top automakers and vehicle-component companies in the region, Europe is leading the future autonomous driving industry and the development of 5G and the future communications market.

The Way I See It: Hyun-jin Song (Technical Leader, Commercial Marketing, Germany)

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Tell us about your role on the commercial marketing team
I am in charge of customers in the networking field, one of the main businesses of the German subsidiary. We closely identify key issues and the current status of relevant markets and customers, establish mid-to-long-term sales plans for each customer in alignment with the head office strategy, and carry out tasks to achieve short-term(monthly/quarter) sales goals.

Since we serve as the first window to connect local customers with the head office, it is necessary to judge the needs of various customers quickly and comprehensively, regardless of the field. We are working hard to help to make the best decisions locally or at our headquarters through this.

Tell us about the culture and characteristics of the regional office where you currently work
I believe that a spirit of cooperation, teamwork and strong ties are the driving forces behind the German subsidiary. Because it is a small office, with relatively fewer employees, everyone is busy with their own work, but whenever large or small issues arise within the corporation, it’s in our DNA to try and solve problems together without distinction between expatriates and local members.

As it’s quite common to meet people still unfamiliar with South Korea, I feel prouder as a member of SK hynix and my country when customers recognize the global status of SK hynix and see locally-hired colleagues take pride in working for a global semiconductor company.

What future technology or trend are you interested in most?
How autonomous driving technology will evolve in the future and when the era of fully autonomous driving will be realized is a very interesting topic for me.

It will be quite challenging because it won’t only require complex and diverse cutting-edge technologies, but issues on regulations, insurance, safety and etc. should also be addressed. I think close collaboration with our customers will be even more important in the near future as the issues are closely related to the technological development of the Automotive/Network industry, the main business area of SK hynix in Germany and the growth of our own memory products for cars.

What’s your after-work personal life like there?
After work or on weekends, I spend most of my time playing golf and traveling. You can enjoy golf at a very reasonable price in Germany unlike in Korea, so golf is a must-have hobby if you work as an expatriate in Germany.

Frankfurt, where the German office is located, is a great place to start a trip as it has flights to all parts of Europe. I can go to all the European cities that I’ve always wanted to visit on weekends, without taking a long vacation. Those short travels are even more satisfying for me as I enjoy taking pictures.

Unfortunately, travel is not easy these days due to the COVID-19 situation, but I hope that I could travel freely again when the pandemic is over in the not-too-distant future.

Japan: Strong Leadership in Materials for Semiconductors

Japan has always been known for its leadership in the technology industry. The country plays a strong role in the NAND Flash market and is also a major developer of semiconductor materials, parts and equipment.

SK hynix has a small but mighty team in Japan that works closely together to drive sales and marketing in the region.

The Way I See It: Jung Hur (Technical Leader, Commercial Marketing, Japan)

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Tell us about your role on the commercial marketing team
My role as a marketer based here is to establish strategies to increase corporate sales, strengthen profitability and foundation. Simply put, my role is to plan and manage the sales of the entire corporation.

The main task is to consult with the headquarters and set the quantity and price of products to be sold to customers here. We also analyze local customers’ demand and send the data to headquarters to predict market conditions in accordance with changes in demand.

For example, if PC customers are expected to increase or reduce their production and memory purchases for PCs, reflecting changes in market conditions, in the next quarter, we report our analysis to the headquarters so that the company can prepare an appropriate plan.

Tell us about the culture and characteristics of the regional office where you currently work
Here, we collaborate with each other very well. It is a small corporation where sales, marketing, technology, purchasing, accounting and management teams coexist, so everyone’s willing to provide support to others, regardless of the team/work boundaries.

What future technology or trend are you interested in most?
What interests me the most is how the semiconductor memory business will overcome the technological limitations for tech migration. So, I’m studying how EUV adoption for DRAM and 3D-NAND structure for NAND are evolving.

What’s your after-work personal life like there? any hobbies?
I usually spend time with my family after work, helping my children with their school homework. Compared to Korea, golf is more popular and cheaper here, so I have been playing golf as a hobby.

Due to the COVID-19 situation, it’s not easy to eat out or meet friends, so more recently, I stay home and don’t go out that often.

Singapore: A logistical centerpiece

Singapore, the current center of Asian logistics, is aiming to become an Asian electric vehicle production hub in the future.

The SK hynix team in Singapore oversees operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India together. Similar to Japan, the SK hynix team in Singapore also works closely together to close deals and service customers in the region.

The Way I See It: Yeon-ju Koo (Technical Leader, Administration, Singapore)

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Tell us about your role on the administration team
This is my third year as a Higineer since I joined the company in February 2019. I work for the Administration’s finance team in Singapore and I’m in charge of credit/fund management. My main role is to closely coordinate with banks to support the cash flow and other plans of the headquarters as rising revenues typically require greater volume in financial transactions.

*Higineer: The term, a combination of hynix and engineer, is widely used within SK hynix to refer to the members of the company.

Tell us about the culture and characteristics of the regional office where you currently work
The team in Singapore has always been welcoming and friendly. I have lots of fond memories including getting invited by local friends to spend time on Singapore holidays and learning Singapore’s custom and traditional games.

What future technology or trend are you interested in most?
I am interested in how technology using artificial intelligence will be applied in the future. There are many areas where artificial intelligence can be used, such as medical, logistics, electric vehicles, tourism, and app development. I think SK hynix will have a greater role and status as demand for semiconductor memory, indispensable to AI, increases.

In Singapore, “National AI Strategy” is one of the top five core projects.

What’s your after-work personal life like there?
Before COVID-19, I spent the weekends traveling to neighboring Southeast Asian countries with my friends, taking advantage of Singapore’s geographical position. Malaysia and Batam, an Indonesian island, are just an hour away, so I used to visit them for a weekend getaway.

Nowadays, after work, I usually spend time with my friends, playing tennis or yoga. I also enjoy hiking on weekends.

I hope that in the near future, the pandemic will go away, and we all can travel freely again.

Down the pipeline

Our team’s success comes from its open and diverse culture, technological expertise, and passion for growth. We will continue to meet the needs of our customers, embrace emerging technology, and define industry standards.

Stay tuned for our next employee spotlight article to meet even more members of our growing staff here at SK hynix!

The post [Employee Spotlight Series]: Getting to Know Higineers Around the World first appeared on SK hynix Newsroom.

In this article, we are highlighting our colleagues on the Algorithm and Advanced IP Team at SK hynix Memory Solutions America, who discuss the secret recipe that make our devices unique in the market, and the collaborative and friendly working environment that empowers our members and encourages personal growth.

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The team, based in Silicon Valley, helps bring the advanced technology from initial research to final vigorously tested solutions for the company. Their work focuses on the latest and the most competitive error correction code (ECC) IP design to highly improve the performance and reliability of our memory products.

Our leadership

Our team leaders lead by example and provide transparency to all team members, encouraging open discussion whenever an issue arises. This along with passion for innovative thinking and hard-working spirit is passed down to every employee on the team, regardless of level.

The Way I See It: Fan Zhang (Team Leader)

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Tell us about Algorithm and Advanced IP team at SK hynix Memory Solutions: “Our team is consist of two parts, one is for algorithm development and the other is for its actual implementation. We are trying to bring the advanced technology from early-stage research all the way to fully-proven solutions in various product lines within the company.”

Approach to team-building and career development: “Thanks to SK hynix Memory Solution’s generous support, we have team-building once or twice every quarter. Our company also prompts employees to set up their career development goals and work with managers closely to achieve those goals.”

What’s next for Algorithm and Advanced IP: “One of our team’s missions is to develop better ECC solutions to combat increasing errors from NAND flash. This is really critical to ensure NAND technology can keep current scaling.”

The Way I See It: Hongwei Duan (Senior Manager)

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Role on the team: “My current position is Senior Manager leading design and verification effort for advanced IP team. We are working on the next generation cutting-edge LDPC IPs which will make the cutting-edge enterprise SSD controller more competitive in performance, power and cost.”

How you build company culture: “The culture of SK hynix Memory Solutions is to promote innovation and foster inter-team and intra-team collaboration. This is done through great leadership conveying consistent message no matter how much pressure there is.”

DRAM and NAND technology in simple terms: “NAND is like your notebook you can write information and retain it. DRAM is like scratchpad you can use to work out a problem and thrown away later. Both DRAM and NAND are the main components of laptop computers and smartphones.”

Our engineers

Because of our engineers’ ever-progressing innovation that helps to build best-in-class products in a highly contended market, SK hynix is a top player in the industry. With these employees old and new, we continue to reinforce our technological leadership by introducing the world’s first, smallest, fastest, and lowest-power innovations in the semiconductor industry.

The Way I See It: Meysam Asadi (Senior Staff Engineer)

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Role on the team: “I am a member of algorithm team, which means I am in charge of coming up with algorithms that can improve the performance of the drive. Also, as a team member we quantify the performance of each algorithm by analyzing the obtained result.

Each section’s role in more detail: “Usually algorithm section comes up with different algorithms to improve the performance of some part of drive, mainly the ECC engine. Then these algorithms are tested on software using high processing computers. After the algorithm team observes the performance improvement, the implementation section is in charge of implementing it (called HDL design) using a hardware descriptor language, and debugging and verifying (called DV) the correctness of the designed algorithm.”

How would you describe company culture: “I believe in the phrase, ‘if you create a good place to work, great work takes place’. How to make a good place to work? By taking into account all the important aspects of an employee’s life such as, making the work meaningful by proper company vision, helping employee to improve their work and life balance and creating a good workplace that one can communicate with other colleagues easily.”

The Way I See It: Seyhan Karakulak (Principal Algorithm Research Engineer)

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Role on the team: “I design quantization and compression algorithms to optimize deep neural networks we consider for AI-assisted data storage. The aim of my current project is to reduce the precision of deep neural network weights to achieve reduction in power, latency, and memory requirements while maintaining acceptable accuracy. Such deep neural networks with efficient power and memory requirements, and acceptable accuracy will make machine learning tasks to be run on edge devices.”

Key to team success: “Our team focuses on designing cutting edge algorithms that focuses on from error correcting codes to deep neural networks for AI-assisted data storage systems. We make sure that our algorithms become part of successful products and to attain our goal, we collaborate with across teams that focus on design and media.”

What’s next for Algorithm and Advanced IP: “I am excited to be part of a team that has a vision for the future of data storage systems that incorporate AI and machine learning. The extent of the state-of-the-art research I have been exposed in my role is fulfilling. Regular attendance of machine learning conferences, applying ideas and approaches from information theory and statistical learning to my projects have become a routine I enjoy greatly.”

The Way I See It: Loren Lam (Principal Engineer)

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Role on the team: “My role is to enhance the testbench to make debugging easier as we concentrate to develop tests. I’ve been with the company for about three months, and I am also excited to learn and verify ECC algorithms.”

Best qualities of the team: “Hongwei referred me to the team as he was my manager in previous company. He told me that his team value hard worker and have good skills in verification and eager to discover and learn computing algorithm. I am happy to join the team. We are working on valuable memory to improve the efficiency and reliability of any memory storage devices. The team is very friendly and helpful.”

4th industrial revolution technology semiconductor memory will have biggest impact on: “I think memory have the biggest impact on AI, because it is highly parallel-computation intensive. Many companies are developing their own AI chip. The growth for memory performance and size would grow exponentially.”

The Way I See It: CK Lin (ASIC Design Engineer)

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Role on the team: “I joined in June 2021 and I play a role as an ASIC design engineer in AIP group in charge of the advanced IP design. I really enjoy working with the Algorithm & AIP team. Our team members are thoughtful and supportive.

Why did you join: “SK hynix is a top semiconductor company that focus on memory development in the world. I am working under the environment with full of equality. We talk like trusted friends to solve the problems no matter if you are the leader or not. This creates a very close and positive-working environment.”

Most important thing you’ve learned: “One thing I’ve learned is the ability of multitasking is very important. That doesn’t mean that you have all the high work-load tasks to do at once. It is actually the opposite. You are able to handle some technical and untechnical tasks simultaneously, which can be a little challenging, but also very exciting for me.”

Down the pipeline

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Our team’s success comes from its collaboration, innovation, and accountability. We will continue working on the next generation cutting-edge IPs which will make the cutting-edge enterprise SSD controller more competitive in performance, power, and cost.

Stay tuned for our next employee spotlight article to meet even more members of our growing staff here at SK hynix!

The post [Employee Spotlight Series]: Meet the Algorithm and Advanced IP Team first appeared on SK hynix Newsroom.