How does UFS 4.0 help mobile phones accelerate?

How does UFS 4.0 help mobile phones accelerate?

Keywords: UFS 4.0 mobile phone acceleration   Source: Internet

"If you have recently purchased a new high-performance or flagship mobile phone, you will definitely have a smooth experience when loading games, shooting 4K high-definition videos, and opening large-capacity files. The originally long application loading time has been shortened to It can be ignored. This is not only due to the iterative upgrade of mobile phone SoC, but also the read and write performance of mobile phone storage plays an important factor in it."

If you have recently purchased a new high-performance or flagship mobile phone, you will definitely have a smooth experience when loading games, shooting 4K high-definition videos, and opening large-capacity files. The originally long application loading time has been shortened to negligible. This is not only due to the iterative upgrade of mobile phone SoC, but also the read and write performance of mobile phone storage plays an important factor in it. Interestingly, most of the newly released smartphones have chosen the UFS 4.0*1 storage solution. So how does UFS 4.0 change the mobile experience, and why is it so popular with flagship phones? Let us take a moment this time to understand the power of UFS 4.0.

Unleashing new storage potential

For a long time in the past, eMMC*2 occupied a large number of mobile terminal equipment needs. However, with the rapid popularization of high-speed networks, high-definition videos, and high-performance sensors, eMMC has exposed its shortcomings in the underlying structure design. The 8-bit parallel interface design used by eMMC can only support half-duplex state, that is, when the device performs read and write operations, it can only perform one read and write operation first, and then complete the other. Also, if the transmission frequency is raised too high, interference will occur between parallel signals. Because of this, the read and write speed of the eMMC we actually use is usually only below 400MB/s*3.

The speed of 400MB/s is obviously unable to meet the current high-definition system UI and multimedia material needs. Especially with the rapid improvement of smartphone screen resolution and video and camera performance, it has become particularly critical to achieve fast storage in an instant. This is the stage for UFS performance.

The UFS specification began to be applied to Android smartphones around 2016. It is different from eMMC in that it is a full-duplex interface that allows devices to read and write at the same time. At the standard level, it can help devices consume less power. Achieving high-speed reading and writing further extends the battery life of terminal equipment, so it was quickly promoted in mobile devices.

Like eMMC, UFS has also gone through several generations of updates. Now it has been upgraded to version 4.0, and the theoretical speed has been increased to 4,640MB/s*3. Such a transmission speed was unimaginable in the past. Kioxia actively embraces cutting-edge standards and has launched UFS 4.0 standard products in 2021, which have begun to be applied on many high-performance mobile phones and will continue to expand to more fields in the future. At the same time, this is not the end of Kioxia UFS 4.0 products. The second generation of Kioxia UFS 4.0 products will also be officially released in the near future.

The reason why it is called the second generation is that Kioxia has deeply optimized the product performance under the technical specifications of UFS 4.0, which not only improved its performance but also added more technologies. For example, compared to the first generation, KIOXIA's second-generation UFS 4.0 improves sequential writing performance by 18%, random writing speed by 30%, and random reading performance by 13%.

Not only that, KIOXIA second-generation UFS 4.0 supports the high-speed link startup sequence (HS-LSS) feature, which reduces startup time by 70%. Enhanced security with advanced RPMB (Replay Protected Memory Block) for faster read and write access to secure data. RPMB Purge ensures safe and fast cleanup of discarded and unnecessary RPMB data. At the same time, UFS 4.0 also supports the use of multi-circular queue (MCQ) on the host side, further improving random performance.

Efficiency can be everywhere

Kioxia UFS 4.0 also brings the advantages of low power consumption and small package size to the mobile terminal. For example, lower read and write power consumption can help extend the battery life of mobile devices. Whether it is VR, smart watches, or OLED always-on screen mobile phones, they can achieve better energy efficiency than UFS 3.1 under the same conditions.

The size of the chip package can even affect the size of the final product. Smaller chip packages can allow mobile phones, tablets, and handheld consoles to free up more internal space to install batteries, allowing for more personalized designs and increasing product competitiveness. After all, no student can accept that handheld devices, mobile phones and tablets are the same size. Kioxia UFS 4.0 can reduce the size by 23.4% compared to the previous generation UFS 3.1, leaving enough room for future product design improvements.

It is precisely because of the continuous upgrading of mobile storage technology that game types covering all platforms including mobile phones, handheld consoles, game consoles and PCs have begun to emerge, allowing users to obtain a smooth mobile experience. More importantly, Kioxia UFS 4.0 injects reading and writing performance into mobile devices that is comparable to PCs, brings more room for imagination to its design, and can even lay a solid hardware foundation for the upcoming AI mobile era.

In the near future, we will also have the opportunity to see more mobile products based on KIOXIA UFS 4.0, and they will continue to maintain efficient and smooth storage, helping users obtain a smooth mobile experience anytime, anywhere.

*1 UFS (Universal Flash Storage) is a product category of embedded storage products developed according to the JEDEC UFS standard specification. JEDEC is a registered trademark of JEDEC Solid State Technology Association.

*2 e-MMC is a product type of embedded storage products developed according to the JEDEC e-MMC standard specification.

*3 Performance based on e-MMC v5.1 and UFS v4.0 JEDEC specifications.

The read and write speed is the best value obtained by Kioxia Co., Ltd. in a specific test environment. Kioxia Co., Ltd. does not guarantee the read and write speed of a single device. Read and write speeds may vary depending on the device used and the file size read or written.

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