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It’s the season of giving and receiving, and this year, it’s all about gifts for the home.

Whether your loved ones are near or far this holiday season, we could all use a little extra cheer in our stockings this year. With more time spent inside, we’ll all be looking for gifts that make staying home more enjoyable – like home fitness equipment, the latest streaming tech, and smart home appliances.

So from the fitness fanatic to the super streamer, to the hardcore gamer or the hard-working parent, SK hynix has some memory-enabled gift ideas for everyone on your list.

For the Fitness Fanatic:

Staying in doesn’t have to mean laying low – these connected fitness devices will have you and yours up and running in no time.

Semiconductor memory plays an important role in the operation of popular connected fitness devices like Peloton and Mirror.

In order to function, these technologies must connect your physical fitness equipment with video streaming and data tracking. The result is an immersive fitness experience that can even bring your instructor to life with augmented reality (AR) – letting you get a great workout without even leaving home.

Fitness trackers and smartwatches like Fitbit and Garmin use tiny semiconductor memory chips to collect and manage data on everything from heart rate to steps taken to blood pressure. Then, data centers use much larger memory solutions to store the data from millions of users around the world.

For the Super Streamer:

Whether you’re Keeping Up With the Kardashians or keeping up with your favorite sports teams, every home deserves a connected entertainment center.

Smart TV devices and smart speakers like Amazon Fire TV Stick and Google Nest Hub also rely on memory.

Whether it’s connecting us to millions of entertainment options or processing a voice command in real-time, these devices need semiconductor memory to transfer and process data through the cloud. You might not see it, but these devices must manage massive amounts of data to bring us unlimited video and audio content at the tap of a button or at the sound of a word.

For the Gamer:

Game on! Connect with friends and family through the virtual world of gaming – on any of the next-gen consoles.

2020 was the year of gaming – with sales, streams and excitement through the roof.

Central to this year’s gaming buzz were the all-new Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles – gifts that are bound to make any gamer get excited. But better act quickly, these consoles are hard to get a hold of! And for the first time ever, they are relying on SSDs to change the console gaming experience for the better.

As the gaming industry continues to grow, its games, platforms, hardware and technologies are evolving too. We’re seeing richer games, sharper displays, higher resolutions, quicker gameplay, and ultimately – greater storage requirements and memory needs.

For the Hard-Working Parent:

Working parents have it hard enough this year – Make their lives a little easier with these smart home gadgets?

Spending more time at home means more time to upgrade your living space. You can use tech like smart lights and smart plus to convert any lamp into a smart lamp with voice-controlled accessibility. Just connect to WiFi and control via voice assistant. So next time you want to turn on or off the lights, you just have to ask – nicely!

These smart light systems are powered by IoT technology, enabling them to store and process the data needed to translate these commands into functions we can see at home.

For the Book Lover:

Nothing says winter like cozying up with a good book – give the gift of endless reading with some of the latest e-readers and tablets.

Whether your loved ones are looking for romance, mystery, sci-fi or nonfiction, an e-reader like Kindle or Kobo can locate and download any book in the world in seconds. So why give the gift of a single paperback when you could give the gift of a million choices?

Mobile tablets like these rely on battery power to function, and as such, they’ve driven explosive growth across the mobile application memory field. With low-power memory products like Low Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR) DRAMs, we can minimize power leakage and maximize battery life.

For the Work-From-Homer:

Wave goodbye to Zoom fatigue with a work-from-home set-up complete bound to make your colleagues jealous.

Shopping for a laptop on your holiday shopping list for a work-from-home or remote-learning upgrade? Since the onset of COVID-19, more and more companies are asking employees to “work from home”.

This has caused demand for cloud storage and servers is surging, and in turn, so is demand for semiconductor memory both in data centers and in products like laptops. Don’t get overlooked because of a device with slow processing speeds and poor performance.

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday from SK hynix.

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The post SK hynix Holiday Gift Guide: Memory-Enabled Gifts for the Home first appeared on SK hynix Newsroom.

Semiconductors connect the world as we know it. Running through every aspect of our lives – from business to fitness to entertainment – they power the lightning-fast connectivity we’ve come to expect from our devices and technology. They make our phones, homes and cities smarter, and allow us to push innovation forward. Semiconductor memory is a central piece of this connected experience, storing and processing the huge amounts of data we rely on to carry out the functions of our everyday lives.

Whether we realize it or not, a large portion of semiconductor memory is already within our homes. It lies in many of the smart applications we use at home, including home fitness devices, smart speakers, smart TVs, gaming consoles and more.

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Home Fitness

Source: Peloton Press Site

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You might not know it, but semiconductor memory plays an important role in the operation of popular connected fitness devices like Peloton and Mirror. These technologies merge fitness equipment with video streaming and data tracking to create an immersive at-home fitness experience.

But providing high-resolution, real-time video from live-streamed fitness classes and collecting user information like workout frequency, intensity and body mass index require a huge amount of data – and therefore memory to store and process it. Devices like Mirror, equipped with augmented reality (AR) features that can bring your fitness instructor to life, require even more sophisticated memory solutions.

Fitness trackers and health monitoring devices also need memory – using tiny memory chips like RAMs and ROMs to collect and manage data on everything from heart rate to steps taken to glucose levels. At the same time, data centers use much larger memory solutions to store the data from millions of users around the world.

Home Entertainment

Our Smart TVs and smart speakers rely on memory to transfer and process data through the cloud, whether it’s enabling our connection to the world of entertainment or working to process a voice command instantaneously. These smart devices bring us unlimited video and audio content at the tap of a button or at the sound of a word, therefore, they must have DRAM products – usually DDR3 or LPDDR4 – to process and command massive amounts of data and at incredible speeds. Twenty years ago, this range of capability was almost unimaginable – think about the VHS-player required to play a single videotape, compared to the millions of movies available today through your smart TV.

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Over the next few years, the smart speaker market is will grow exponentially. According to Statista¹, the worldwide revenue for smart speakers is expected to reach $27.8 billion, nearly 2.5 times from the revenue in 2018.

When it comes to gaming, clunky video gaming consoles might also become an item of the past. As 5G service develops and our computing technologies grow, “cloud gaming” is on the horizon. Cloud gaming gives players the ability to game – wherever and whenever – from any internet-connected device. Once again, it’s memory that makes this possible.

With cloud gaming, all of the data essential to real-time gameplay and playing with others is stored, processed and calculated within a central server – which adopts computing memories such datacenter-oriented enterprise solid state drives (eSSDs) – rather than on individual devices. This means that with such high-end NAND Flash solutions, players can enjoy high-spec games without a high-end computing system or a large storage capacity to install the data. All they need is a super-fast internet connectivity, a display screen, and a controller.

Home Convenience

Beyond entertainment, many of us count on semiconductor memory to carry out our everyday needs around the house. From keeping our food cold to washing our clothes or regulating the temperatures of our homes, memory helps us get it done.

It might surprise you to hear that semiconductor memory actually plays a key role in temperature control in our refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners. It stores and processes the data needed to manage these household systems. We even use memory in devices such as smart light bulb systems and smart home appliances that can be programmed and controlled from anywhere via WiFi.

Next Up: Smart Cities

We’ve talked about how semiconductor memory connects our homes – but how does it connect our homes to other homes and cities to other cities? As demand for mobile and computing devices like smartphones skyrockets around the world, SK hynix and other memory providers are working double-time to improve our DRAM and NAND Flash memory solutions to keep up.

Our next article in the Invisible Memory series will dig deeper into this topic and the ways in which memory keeps our cities running at lightning speeds, through 5G, IoT, AR/VR, AI, and automotive technology.

¹Statista Research Department, “Smart speaker market revenue worldwide in 2017, 2018 and 2022”, Statista (2020)

The post [Invisible Memory Part.2] Semiconductor Memory in Our Smart Homes first appeared on SK hynix Newsroom.