SK hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chip maker, won this year’s R&D 100 Awards, also known as "the Oscars of innovation," with its cutting-edge Key Value Computational Storage Drive (KV-CSD), the company said Friday.

Among the 100 winners of the 2023 R&D 100 Awards, which recognizes the most promising products or technologies that will bring change to the industry, SK hynix marked its name in the IT/Electrical category.

“Once commercialized, KV-CSD will later be utilized in not only high-performance computing, but also the artificial intelligence and the big data industry,” the SK hynix Computational Storage team said. “We aim to boost SK hynix’s competitiveness by making our own technology the industry standard.”

KV-CSD is a next-generation data storage device jointly developed by SK hynix and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Korean chipmaker’s Computational Storage team worked on KV-CSD itself, while the LANL High Performance Computing division focused on adopting the storage device into a supercomputer.

Featuring petabyte-scale storage capacity, KV-CSD boasts an exceptional reading and writing speed of data, the company said.

By adding indexing capability -- sorting data with its primary key -- it offers significant speedups and massive reductions in the amount of data retrieved when analyzing high dimensional data. SK hynix is the world's first to apply the indexing feature in KV-CSD.

Serving as a solution provider to save time and energy, KV-CSD is about 7.4 times faster than a traditional solid-state drive, the company added.