SK hynix unveiled the first standard specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) developed with SanDisk. SK hynix said on Aug. 4 it presented the HBF standard at FMS (Future of Memory and Storage) 2026, which opened in Santa Clara, California.

HBF is a new memory tier positioned between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SSDs. It delivers HBM-level fast data transfer speeds and NAND-based large capacity at the same time. It is drawing attention as a technology that can secure both bandwidth and capacity scalability as data processing surges with the spread of AI inference.

The specification is the first result produced about 6 months after the consortium was launched in February, following the start of standardisation cooperation with SanDisk in August last year. It defines capacity up to 512GB based on two configurations that stack NAND dies in 8 layers and 16 layers, and it sets three bandwidth grades that can deliver about 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s.

It also adopts UCIe, an open standard interface that connects different semiconductor chiplets at high speed, laying the groundwork to connect flexibly to various processors such as GPUs and CPUs. The specification was 공개 through the Open Compute Project (OCP) and has become an industry standard. Google and Tenstorrent are currently participating in the HBF consortium.

On Aug. 4, the first day of FMS 2026, Kim Cheon-seong (김천성), head of division for Solution development, and Kang Wook-sung (강욱성), in charge of next-generation product planning, will deliver a joint keynote. With the spread of agentic AI that sets and executes goals on its own without human intervention, they are set to present the direction of a hierarchical memory-based architecture that systematically connects memories with different characteristics, based on the premise that it is difficult to respond with a single memory product alone.

On Aug. 6, Lim Ui-cheol (임의철), in charge of Solution AT, Xiaoyu Ma (샤오위 마), a researcher at Google DeepMind, and Rajiv Nagavalli (라지브 나가비라바), a vice president at SanDisk, will take part in a panel discussion. Under the theme, "Breaking through the memory wall with HBF", they will focus on discussing HBF's role and potential in AI infrastructure.

At its exhibition booth, SK hynix will unveil for the first time a 10th-generation (V10) 375-layer 4D NAND wafer and product under development. It is a product that improves performance per watt by 2.5 times versus the previous generation, and the company plans to begin mass production of high-performance, high-capacity eSSDs based on it in early next year. Kim said, "Through HBF, we will expand the boundary between memory and storage and contribute to implementing a new architecture that raises efficiency across the system."