With unprecedented demands on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), Richard Walsh of Samsung Semiconductor Europe considers what the industry needs to do for the next generation of memory technology.
www.electronicsweekly.com, Sept. 01, 2021 –
The wonder that is HBM has been on a steady journey over the past few years. Performance, power efficiency and speed have all improved incrementally over time. Until recently, this progress has been perfectly fine to support the pace of technological change throughout much of the 2010s.
But we're now at a point where things have got to change. Artificial intelligence-based applications like recommendation engines, image classification and natural language processing are everywhere – in phones, smart speakers, vehicles, wearables and homes. And that's just AI. Machine learning, virtual reality, next-generation gaming and other intensive applications are here to stay.
All of these applications are now placing unprecedented demands on HBM, which simply cannot continue to improve at the pace these new technologies need. Not only do these applications need to process huge swathes of data, but they also need to do it faster and better, and the improvements need to come quickly. Algorithms demand high access rates to large data capacities.