• SK hynix won the IT/Electrical category at the 2023 R&D 100 Awards for its Key Value Computational Storage Drive (KV-CSD)
• Featuring the world’s first application of indexing technology, the KV-CSD assigns key values to data to significantly speed up data classification and processing
• Due to its ultra-fast performance, the product is expected to contribute to AI, big data, and high-performance computing
• SK hynix’s technical team behind the KV-CSD will strive to make its technology a global standard to enhance the company’s competitiveness

SK hynix won the IT/Electrical category at the 2023 R&D 100 Awards held in San Diego, California on November 16 for its next-generation Key Value Computational Storage Drive (KV-CSD).

Referred to as the “Oscars of Innovation” by those in industry and academia, the R&D 100 Awards is an annual science and technology awards ceremony that recognizes the year’s 100 most innovative technologies and products in the world.

▲SK hynix’s KV-CSD featuring the industry’s first indexing technology and a controller that supports its data computation

SK hynix collaborated with the U.S.-based Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)¹ for the KV-CSD project, as the company handled product development while LANL created the system that applied the KV-CSD to supercomputers.

The product has garnered significant attention in the high-performance computing (HPC) field for its rapid read/write speeds that enables it to process several petabytes (PB)² of data in minutes, as well as its self-computing capability which ensures swift data analysis.

The KV-CSD also grabbed headlines for its world-first adoption of indexing technology which dramatically increases data retrieval speed. When storing a single file, data is normally split and stored in multiple blocks³. However, indexing technology applies unique keys to the split data so that the indexing criteria can be used to quickly collect and process the data. Consequently, KV-CSD is up to 7.4 times faster than conventional storage devices such as solid-state drives (SSDs) which collect data and search for it block-by-block.

¹Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL): A national laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy which conducts research on national security, nuclear fusion, and space exploration.
²Petabyte: A petabyte is equal to 1 million gigabytes.
³Block: A space where data is stored in a storage device. The smallest unit of data storage is a cell, and a collection of cells is a page. A group of pages is called a block. A storage device such as an SSD is composed of several blocks.

“As a next-generation storage device that delivers only the desired results to the CPU after completing rapid processing and data analysis based on key values and indexing technology, the KV-CSD will prove to be valuable for HPC, AI, and big data industries that process large amounts of data,” said Project Leader Woosuk Chung of the Computational Storage team at SK hynix. “We will focus on commercializing the product so that it can be used in various fields.”

A Meaningful Step Forward: Presenting Advanced Storage Tech to the World

▲ Members of SK hynix’s Computational Storage team who developed the KV-CSD (from left to right); Woosuk Chung, Soonyeal Yang, Inhyuk Park, and Taejin Oh

The next generation of storage devices is being developed based on several key concepts. These include processing data in a location close to the CPU, having memory itself compute data rather than the CPU, and many more. Storage devices that compute data themselves are called computational storage drives (CSDs), and KV-CSD falls in this category.

The Computational Storage team claims that receiving the award was even more special as it took a lot of trial and error to integrate new technologies into existing CSDs during the development of the KV-CSD.

“We are proud to have received a global award that is coveted by many global research institutes and companies,” said Chung. “Above all, winning the award is significant as it introduced SK hynix’s outstanding storage technology to the world.”

Solving Customers’ Pain Points: Reducing Data Processing Time

The KV-CSD further enhances SK hynix’s reputation as a solution provider as the product solves a crucial pain point for customers by dramatically reducing big data processing time.

▲ Team Leader Woosuk Chung points out the strong features of KV-CSD

“Our customer LANL’s main issue was that the processing speed would slow down when large amounts of data was stored and analyzed due to unnecessary data reading,” explained Chung. “The solution was to increase the processing speed of the CSD, so we proposed a storage device based on key values and indexing.”

▲ Soonyeal Yang talks about the distinct features of the KV-CSD

In particular, indexing technology was instrumental. On top of going through the tough task of implementing key-value storage, the team broke new ground to perform the world’s first integration of indexing technology in a storage device.

“With conventional SSDs, it takes tens of hours to extract desired data from LANL’s own research simulations that generate several PBs of data,” said Technical Leader Soonyeal Yang. “However, the KV-CSD locates and reads key-value data directly from the indexed list, reducing the data processing time to just several minutes.”

“Additionally, as it is the job of the CPU to scan through PBs of data to retrieve desired data, this process puts a strain on the system,” Yang added. “However, KV-CSD’s indexing technology speeds up data processing while minimizing the burden on the system”.

▲ Inhyuk Park explains a core technology of the KV-CSD called secondary indexing

Among the indexing technologies, Technical Leader Inhyuk Park emphasized the importance of secondary indexing. This technology subdivides the indexing list to further categorize data. “For example, if you have a database of products sold by each time of day, general indexing will only allow you to find out which products were sold at specific times,” explained Park. “But with secondary indexing, you can also find out the person who bought the product in addition to how much they paid for it. Ultimately, a range of data can be processed more quickly.”

▲ Taejin Oh recalls the challenges of developing a test application for the KV-CSD

Nevertheless, the team members agree that uncertainty was the biggest challenge in achieving this latest milestone. As they were building a completely new product, understanding new technologies, keeping up with trends, coming up with an architectural design, and everything related to developing the product were all fresh challenges for the team. More notably, the members faced several critical moments during the performance validation that came after the development of the prototype.

“As a new type of storage device, there was no test application that matched the product,” said Technical Leader Taejin Oh. “After spending a long time to reform existing test applications to adopt properties of the KV-CSD, our team eventually succeeded in developing our own test application. In the end, we could finally verify the performance of the product.”

Leading the Future of Storage Device Technology

Chung has high hopes for his team’s creation. “We aim to ensure SK hynix’s technology becomes a global standard to enhance the company’s position in the market,” he said. “We will continue to conduct follow-up research and standardization work, including joint efforts to build an ecosystem for the product.”

The Computational Storage team at SK hynix is determined to use this experience of growth to further excel in its research and development projects, and hinted at more innovations to come: “We will continue to surprise the market with our pioneering next-generation storage devices.”

The post SK hynix Picks Up “Oscar of Innovation”: Company’s Groundbreaking KV-CSD Wins 2023 R&D 100 Award first appeared on SK hynix Newsroom.

Figure 1. SK hynix’s booth at FMS 2023 featured some of the company’s latest products and technologies

As the world’s largest memory and storage trade show, the annual Flash Memory Summit (FMS) is renowned for exhibiting revolutionary high-speed memory and SSD products. At FMS 2023 held August 8^th-10^th at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, SK hynix continued this legacy of innovation by showcasing groundbreaking memory solutions under the slogan “United Through Technology”. During the event, executives from SK hynix gave a keynote speech to share the companies’ developments in the memory sector.

Leading 4D NAND Solutions Key to the Multimodal AI Era

Figure 2. SK hynix’s EVP and Head of NAND development Jungdal Choi and EVP and Head of Solution Development Hyun Ahn during their keynote speech

On August 8^th, SK hynix’s EVP and Head of NAND development Jungdal Choi along with EVP and Head of Solution Development Hyun Ahn gave a keynote speech titled “Industry-Leading 4D NAND Technology and Solutions Enabling the Multimodal AI¹ Era”.

¹Multimodal AI: Combines various data types (image, text, speech, numerical data, etc.) with multiple intelligence processing algorithms to achieve higher performance levels.

Choi revealed that the company is currently developing the world’s first 321-layer NAND product, the fifth generation of 4D NAND. Choi said that the new product, which is the first in the industry to exceed 300 layers, is set to help the company solidify its technological leadership in NAND. Meanwhile, Ahn introduced the company’s ultra-high performance UFS 4.0 and PCIe 5^th generation (Gen5) SSD products for use in data centers and PCs. The continuous development of SSD products is essential as they are set to become an essential storage solution for application with multimodal AI, which analyzes and calculates vast amounts of data on various platforms. The pair concluded by stating that SK hynix is committed to supporting multimodal AI and other advanced technologies by developing next-generation PCIe Gen6 SSDs and UFS 5.0 memory-based products.

Breaking Barriers: Unveiling Pioneering 4D NAND & SSD Solutions

Figure 3. SK hynix’s product line-up, including its 4D NAND solutions, were on display

SK hynix is continually looking to advance its 4D NAND technology in terms of performance and reliability. The company’s development of the industry’s first 96-layer 4D NAND based on charge trap flash² (CTF) in 2018 became a launchpad for further innovations, leading to the development of its 238-layer 4D NAND four years later in another industry first. Continuing this line of industry firsts, SK hynix showcased samples of its 321-layer 1 Tb 4D NAND, which offers a 59% improvement in productivity compared with the previous generation 238-layer, 512 Gb NAND chips. This improvement was realized by technological developments that enabled the stacking of more cells and a larger storage capacity on a single chip, thereby increasing the total capacity of a single wafer.

The groundbreaking 321-layer NAND product was later presented at SK hynix’s booth along with other NAND solutions, including the company’s PCle³ Gen5 enterprise SSD (eSSD) called PS1030 which utilizes V7 NAND. The PS1030, which was applied to a supermicro server for the demonstration, delivers the fastest sequential read speed in the industry—14,800 MB/s. It also offers a random read performance of 3,300 kIOPS⁴, highlighting its specifications as a high-performance eSSD.

²Charge trap flash (CTF): Unlike floating gate, which stores electric charges in conductors, CTF stores electric charges in insulators, which eliminates interference between cells, improving read and write performance while reducing cell area per unit compared to floating gate technology.

³Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCle): A serial-structured, high-speed input/output interface used on the motherboard of digital devices.

⁴Thousand Input/Output Operations Per Second (kIOPS): A measure of how many read and write operations a storage device can perform in a second.

Visitors to the SK hynix booth could also see another one of the company’s SSDs, the PCIe Gen4 PC811.  Applied to a PC for the demonstration, the PC811 is SK hynix’s first V8 NAND-based mainstream client SSD (cSSD). Other SSDs on show included its high-speed Platinum P41, ultra-low power Gold P31, and the company’s first portable SSD for consumers, SK hynix Beetle X31.

Unleashing the Power of HPC With KV-CSD

Figure 4. SK hynix’s Woosuk Chung, team leader for the Computational Storage department, held a session on KV-CSD, which was also displayed at the company’s booth

SK hynix also held the second demonstrations of its pioneering Key Value Store Computational Storage Device (KV-CSD) following on from its debut at last year’s FMS. Co-developed with U.S.-based Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the KV-CSD is a next-generation intelligent storage product which improves write and read capabilities for high performance computing (HPC).

The impact of the KV-CSD was discussed in a session on August 10^th by SK hynix’s Woosuk Chung, team leader for the Computational Storage department. Titled “Architecture of a Query Accelerating KV-CSD in a HPC System”, the talk revealed how the new KV-CSD overcomes the limitations of software key-value stores.

High-Performance Mobile and Automotive Solutions

Figure 5. SK hynix’s mobile and automotive solutions

SK hynix also exhibited its technologies for the mobile and automotive sectors at FMS 2023. The company’s line-up of V7 512 Gb universal flash storage⁵ (UFS) products was on display, including those based on UFS 2.2, UFS 3.1, and UFS 4.0—the latest specification which offers enhanced bandwidth speed and efficiency. Additionally, the company’s universal multichip package⁶ (uMCP), which combines its mobile DRAM LPDDR and UFS, was also presented at the booth.

Moving to solutions for the automotive market, SK hynix’s LPDDR5X mobile DRAM and HBM2E DRAM were among the products displayed as they are essential components of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)⁷. The HBM2E highlights SK hynix’s strength in the automotive sector as it is the only company to develop HBM products specifically for the industry. As well as ADAS, SK hynix’s automotive solutions support other functions. For example, its eMMC 5.1 embedded multimedia card is utilized for in-car connectivity, while its UFS 3.1-based and SSD products are applied for in-vehicle infotainment and storage, respectively.

⁵Universal Flash Storage (UFS): A breakthrough type of flash memory that can simultaneously read and write data. Due to its low-power consumption, high-performance and reliability, UFS is widely applied in mobile devices.

⁶Universal multichip package (uMCP): A multi-chip package that combines DRAM and NAND flash into one product.

⁷Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS): A system that utilizes various technologies to help drivers in routine navigation and parking without fully automating the process.

Never Standing Still

SK hynix always has one eye on the future, and this was exemplified during its successful time at FMS 2023. Despite already offering a range of industry-leading solutions, the company will not rest on its laurels as it aims to further improve it line-up of NAND and other high-performance memories in the future.

The post FMS 2023: SK hynix Showcases World’s First 321-Layer NAND Samples & Storage Solutions first appeared on SK hynix Newsroom.

SK hynix joined the August 2-4 event at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, the first in-person FMS since 2019. In the event’s keynote and other sessions, company executives and project leaders discussed new products and the challenges that went into their development. Among the keynote speakers were SK hynix Executive Vice President and Head of NAND Development Jungdal Choi and Sanjay S. Talreja, senior vice president and general manager at US subsidiary Solidigm.

Image 1. SK hynix’s booth at FMS 2022, where attendees could experience the company’s latest products

In their keynote titled “Unlocking the Potential of Data – the New Paradigm of Storage”, the executives explained how innovative NAND technology is addressing the ever-growing need for “DataCosm”, the unique confluence of data, storage, and computing.

Transferring More Data, Faster: The World’s Most Advanced NAND

During the August 2 presentation, Choi unveiled the world’s first 238-layer 512Gb Triple-Level Cell (TLC) 4D NAND with plans to start mass production in the first half of 2023. What makes this latest product stand out is that it is simultaneously the most layered and smallest in area, in turn dramatically improving productivity, data transfer speed, and power efficiency.

Talreja also unveiled the world’s first working Penta-Level Cell (PLC) SSD with the ability to store five bits of data per memory cell, 25% more data in the same footprint compared to quad-level cell (QLC) SSDs. The company is now well-placed to grow in areas including modern workloads such as AI, machine learning and big data analytics; building out of 5G infrastructure and displacing hard disk drives, which still store more than 85% of all data center data.

Image 2. Jungdal Choi and Sanjay S. Talreja share the stage as they deliver their keynote speech

Collaboration for Memory for CXL & Next-Generation Storage

SK hynix’s Head of DRAM Product Planning Uksong Kang and Woosuk Chung, director of Storage SA, also introduced their achievements during technical seminars. During the MemVerge session on August 2, Kang announced development of the company’s first DDR5 DRAM-based Compute Express Link (CXL) samples. The new product redefines memory-as-a-service thanks to CXL memory’s bandwidth/capacity expansion, media differentiation, controller differentiation, and pooling. Kang also stressed the importance of industry collaboration to build CXL memory ecosystem.

Image 3. CXL sample in hand, Uksong Kang introduces the product during his sponsored session

Meanwhile, during his Thursday (August 4) session, Chung demonstrated a next-generation intelligent storage product and the world’s first ordered Key Value Store Computational Storage Device (KV-CSD) that improves write and read capabilities for high performance computing. Developed in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the now two-year partnership played an important role in the development of the product, with performance testing performed on LANL’s supercomputer.

Santosh Kumar, director of NAND technical marketing at SK hynix, joined moderator Paul Saffo from Stanford University and executives from other NAND companies in a roundtable discussion “NAND Flash and its Impact on the World” on August 4. The speakers discussed the impact NAND Flash has had on the world over the past 35 years, future applications of NAND Flash and the challenges that memory technologies continue to face.

Image 4. Santosh Kumar (second from the left) participates in the “NAND Flash and its Impact on the World” roundtable discussion

After a successful FMS 2022, SK hynix’s Choi hopes to leverage the momentum to develop more products that push the technology barrier. “We will continue innovations to find breakthroughs in technological challenges,” he said.

The post SK hynix Unlocks NAND Memory Potential with Innovative Products at FMS 2022 first appeared on SK hynix Newsroom.