South Korean SK hynix has captured about half of the world market for HBM class memory, and it is not going to give up its share to competitors, and therefore is actively mastering the production of HBM4 generation chips. Recent reports from South Korea indicate that at the testing stage, it was possible to achieve a 70 percent yield of good products when producing 12-layer HBM4 chips.
Image Source: SK Hynix
This was reported by the South Korean publication ETNews, which considers such a product quality indicator to be quite high for the preliminary stage of HBM4 chip preparation for production. At the end of last year, the previous stage of HBM4 test production demonstrated a yield of 60%. In part, the rapid progress in product quality is ensured by the use of the fifth generation 10-nm process technology (1b) for the production of DRAM crystals that form the HBM4 stack. This process technology is already used in the production of memory crystals for HBM3E.
SK hynix is expected to begin shipping HBM4 samples to Nvidia in June this year, with production volumes expected by the end of Q3. This will allow Nvidia to introduce its Rubin-generation accelerators with HBM4 memory in the second half of this year. Competing Micron Technology expects to begin mass production of HBM4 no earlier than 2026. Samsung hopes to do so by the end of this year, but it is said to have problems with high levels of product defects.