The Era of UFS 4.0, Announced?

Samsung Electronics recently announced the development of its Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 4.0 solution, the first UFS 4.0 product to comply with the recently approved JEDEC storage standard for next-generation mobile and computing systems.

Samsung UFS 4.0 will deliver speeds of up to 23.2 gigabits per second (Gbps) per lane, according to the company. This is twice as fast as the previous leading UFS solution (UFS 3.1). This will make UFS 4.0 ideal for 5G smartphones that require large amounts of data processing, such as high-resolution images and high-volume mobile games, as well as automotive and AR/VR applications.

With Samsung's 7th generation V-NAND and proprietary controller, the newly developed Samsung UFS 4.0 will feature sequential read speeds of 4,200 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speeds of 2,800 MB/s, which will deliver speeds approximately 2X and 1.6X faster than the previous UFS 3.1 offering, respectively.

Power efficiency has also been dramatically improved. Samsung's new UFS 4.0 will offer sequential read speeds of up to 6.0 MB/s per milliampere (mA), a 46 percent improvement over UFS 3.1. This will allow smartphones to last longer with the same battery capacity.

Samsung UFS 4.0 will include an advanced replay-protected memory block (RPMB). This design is 1.8 times more efficient at storing important personal data that can only be read or written with authenticated access.

This latest mobile storage solution is extremely small, with a maximum size of 11mm x 13mm x 1mm.

What is UFS?

UFS or Universal Flash Storage is a newer flash memory specification designed to replace the slower eMMC (embedded multimedia card) standard. It was designed by JEDEC and first introduced in 2011.

UFS is equipped with an LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signalling) serial interface for data transfer. This allows simultaneous read and writes operations to be performed. In addition to supporting SCSI Tagged Command Queuing, UFS can handle multiple commands simultaneously and reorder tasks when necessary.

UFS 3.1 brings additional upgrades from standard SATA and NVMe SSDs to mobile devices. For example, Write Booster reserves a small amount of capacity and treats MLC/TLC/QLC as SLC NAND memory. pseudo-SLC will act as a cache for higher write speeds. hpb (Host Performance Booster) uses onboard system DRAM to store translation tables or Logical to Physical (LTP) address map to improve random performance.

Despite the poor performance, eMMC is still a cheaper and more popular choice for smartphones, tablets, and laptops. However, no major improvements have been made to eMMC since its introduction in 2015 with eMMC 5.1.

In contrast, UFS, which has evolved over multiple generations, will further increase in bandwidth to approximately 4800 MB/s with the ongoing development of UFS 4.0, which will be introduced in 2022. UFS enables higher performance, efficiency, and endurance using more advanced flash technologies, such as multi-layer 3D TLC or QLC NAND memory.

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