- Sandisk reveals a high bandwidth (HBF), an alternative based on the Nand in HBM
- HBF corresponds to the HBM bandwidth, offering a capacity of 8 to 16x at a lower cost
- Sandisk plans to establish a technical advisory advice for industry experts
It certainly seems that the separation of Western Digital lit a fire under SanDisk. During his recent investor day, the Flash memory specialist looks at the super large SSDs, with the promise of larger ones to come, and revealed a new cheaper dramatic alternative called 3D Memory Matrix.
During the same event, Sandisk also unveiled its concept of bandwidth flash (HBF) which aims HBM by increasing it with Nand Flash to respond to IA inference workloads. The key objectives of Sandisk with HBF seems to be to match the HBM bandwidth while providing 8 to 16 times the capacity at a similar cost.
According to a slide that Sandisk has shared, HBF combines BICS technology with the CBA WAFER link, allowing an effective high density stack. The company has developed a proprietary stacking technology that would promise an ultra-basic warpage, which makes it possible to obtain a 16-die stack without major structural problems.
Scaling up to 4 to
The HBF architecture has been developed in the past year, with Sandisk incorporating the contributions of “Major IA Players” (these are not names, unfortunately).
The slide diagram shows an HBF battery, which consists of several dies to the HBF nucleus connected via the TSV (crossing the silicon via) and the micro-bosses, interfacing with a logical and phy matrix, which then connects to a GPU , a CPU, a TPU or Soc would say. The whole battery is on an interposer at the top of a package substrate, similar to the packaging design used in HBM.
HBF is not a right ignition replacement for HBM, but it shares the same electric interface, it will therefore only need minor protocol adjustments, according to Sandisk.
In another slide, a GPU with HBM providing 192 GB of total memory, is compared to an alternative version combining HBF and HBM which increases memory capacity to 3 TB. A completely optimized configuration with only HBF (which you can see at the top from the page) can evolve up to an impressive 4 TB.
The HBF HBF roadmap (below) shows how the company sees technology progress through several generations, focusing on capacity, reading bandwidth and energy efficiency. In the first generation, HBF establishes a reference base for these measures. In the second generation, the capacity should increase by 1.5x, while the reading bandwidth sees an improvement of 1.45x and the energy efficiency decreases slightly to 0.8x. In the third generation (there is no indication of the moment when Sandisk expects to arrive at this stage), HBF should double its capacity and read the bandwidth compared to its initial version, the energy efficiency falling more to 0.64x.
HBF is likely to receive a boost of rivals like Samsung and SK Hynix which are strongly invested in the HBM market of $ 100 billion. Donatingly aware of this, Sandisk seeks to establish an open standard ecosystem, as well as a technical advisory advice made up of industry experts and key partners.
