Memory Design Insights: A Look at the Applications for UFS

In the automotive market, the development of more advanced infotainment systems, autonomous driving capabilities, digital clusters, etc. has created increased demand for flash memory within the vehicle. Accelerated processing power and increased data storage capacity are crucial to enabling these new technologies, and e-MMC has been the data storage technology of choice – until now.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen phone makers aggressively move from e-MMC to UFS storage for their high-end devices to take advantage of UFS’s increased performance, and we are starting to see this trend for the automotive world as well. As the breadth of electronics within vehicles continues to grow, the storage demands also continue to expand. Just as our UFS for consumer applications boosts overall system performance in mobile devices, our Automotive UFS has a similarly positive impact on automotive applications. In fact, UFS will ultimately be the embedded memory of choice for automotive applications, replacing e-MMC, especially for functions within the vehicle needing greater amounts of storage, including infotainment, mapping, event data recorders and autonomous driving.

UFS continues its migration into many other applications as well, from augmented and virtual reality systems to tablets and more. Just about any application that currently uses densities ranging from 32GB to 512GB, that require good performance while needing to maintain low power, may be well suited to take advantage of UFS’s enhanced capabilities over e-MMC. 

What does the future hold? It’s safe to say that UFS performance will continue to advance, widening the performance gap vs. e-MMC. Here at TMA, we’ll continue to drive these advances forward to maintain the UFS memory leadership role we’ve cultivated over the last 6 years since first introducing UFS to the market in early 2013. Get the big picture here: http://www.toshiba.com/tma/technologymoves/design-insights.jsp.


Notes:

Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a trademark and product category for a class of embedded memory products built to the JEDEC UFS standard specification.

Definition of capacity: Toshiba Memory Corporation defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 240 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.

e-MMC is a product category for a class of embedded memory products built to the JEDEC e-MMC Standard specification and is a trademark of the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association.

All company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of KIOXIA America, Inc.

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