Kioxia Targets Flagship Phones With Blazing-Fast 10.8GB/s UFS 5.0 Storage
Faster storage is en route to future high-end smartphones and other mobile devices, and it's coming in the form of UFS 5.0 chips based on the next-generation of Unified Flash Storage protocol. JEDEC is still in the process of standardizing UFS 5.0, but in the meantime, Kioxia said it is already sending out evaluation samples to chipset vendors that will end up deploying the speedy storage chips.
Kioxia's UFS 5.0 solution pairs a new controller design developed in-house specifically for UFS 5.0 with its own 8th generation 3D BiCS flash memory. The upcoming chips have been redesigned for a smaller footprint measuring 7.5mm by 13mm to give device makers more flexibility in their designs. They have the option of choosing between 512GB and 1TB capacities.
The exiting part, however, is the raw speed. Kioxia's UFS 5.0 storage utilizes MIPI M-PHY version 6.0, a high-speed and power-efficient physical layer interface standard for mobile and automotive applications. The latest version sports a new HS-GEAR6 mode that bumps the theoretical interface speed ceiling to 46.6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) per lane.
Utilizing two lanes, UFS 5.0 paves the way for top speeds of up to 10.8 gigabytes per second (GB/s) for both reads and writes. Overhead will cut into some of the raw speed potential, but we're still looking at a big performance jump. To put it into perspective, UFS 4.0 and 4.1 support interface speeds of up to 23.2 Gb/s per lane and 5.8GB/s per device (based on two lanes). UFS 5.0 is around twice as fast.
One of the primary benefits of UFS 5.0 storage is on-device AI.
"Kioxia continues to drive innovation in embedded flash memory with the development of UFS 5.0 solutions designed for next-generation mobile applications," said Maitry Dholakia, vice president, Memory Business Unit, KIOXIA America, Inc. "By delivering the high speeds and performance required for advanced on-device AI and providing early samples of high-capacity, high-speed solutions, we are helping customers accelerate the development and validation of future-ready smartphones."
In some respects, we're at a bit of an inflection point in device designs now that AI is playing a such a prominent role on the backend. Big tech is investing heavily into AI hardware, and eventually we'll see consumer devices place a greater emphasis on AI beyond what already exists (even mid-range solutions like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 are focused on on-device AI nowadays). That's where faster storage such as Kioxia's UFS 5.0 solution will play a role.
