South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc, the world’s second-largest memorychip maker, yesterday said that it would collaborate with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to make the next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
SK Hynix dominates the market for HBM chips — crucial components to power AI — and is a top supplier to US-based chip titan Nvidia Corp. TSMC also supplies Nvidia.
The South Korean company “recently signed a memorandum of understanding with TSMC for collaboration to produce next-generation HBM,” SK Hynix said in a statement.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
SK Hynix “plans to proceed with the development of HBM4, or the sixth generation of the HBM family, slated to be mass produced from 2026, through this initiative,” the statement added.
“We expect a strong partnership with TSMC to help accelerate our efforts for open collaboration with our customers and develop the industry’s best-performing HBM4,” SK Hynix president Justin Kim said. “With this cooperation in place, we will strengthen our market leadership as the total AI memory provider further by beefing up competitiveness in the space of the custom memory platform.”
To develop HBM4, TSMC’s “advanced logic process” would be adopted to produce “customized HBM that meets a wide range of customer demand for performance and power efficiency,” SK Hynix said.
The two companies would also collaborate to optimize the integration of SK Hynix’s HBM and TSMC’s chip-on-wafer-on-substrate packaging process, the South Korean company said.
“TSMC and SK Hynix have already established a strong partnership over the years. We’ve worked together in integrating the most advanced logic and state-of-the art HBM in providing the world’s leading AI solutions,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said.
SK Hynix last month said that it had begun mass production of the HBM3E, the latest HBM iteration.
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