
Driving Innovation: e-MMC vs. UFS for Automotive
Last month in the ‘Flash Memory Matters’ blog, we explored managed flash products and the various use cases and markets for e-MMC and Universal Flash Storage (UFS). One significant market for managed flash is the automotive market. As vehicles become more automated and connected, their memory requirements grow.
Early Automotive Memory Requirements
Ten years ago, the memory requirements for automotive applications, such as instrument clusters, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), and driver assistance, ranged from 4 gigabytes (GB) to 32GB. These needs were primarily supported by SD cards and e-MMC. NOR Flash was also used for code execution and storage of critical images and files.
During this time, KIOXIA entered the automotive market with our Auto I Temperature e-MMC (-40°C to +105°C), offering density ranges from 8GB to 32GB. This range adequately supported the initial data storage requirements for the automotive industry for several years. At that time, the total memory requirements in a vehicle were around 64GB, including both NOR and NAND Flash.
Automotive’s Evolving Requirements
As society's dependence on digital experiences grew, more features and functions were integrated into vehicles. Touchscreens, cameras, connectivity, and Artificial Intelligence became critical for enhancing the overall in-vehicle experience. Consequently, the need for higher capacity storage emerged, with density ranges nearing 64GB and overall system memory requirements reaching 96GB. In some instances, NOR Flash was phased out, and e-MMC was used for boot memory and storage of important files to partition the device into a secure block.
Fast forward to today, and the trend of connectivity and computer-like vehicles continues, pushing memory requirements even higher. Additional features and conditional driving automation are evolving, including route decision-making and data recording of events. On the wireless front, telematics, gateways, and V2X (vehicle-to-everything) capabilities are being added, pushing overall memory requirements up to the 1 terabyte (TB) range. As the memory demands of vehicles continues to grow, automakers are eager to find memory solutions that support current functionality and enable new innovations.
The UFS Advantage
Auto I Temperature UFS supports faster boot-up and read/write times, better power efficiency, higher data storage capability, and long-term support. KIOXIA offers a broad lineup of automotive industrial temperature devices, starting at 32GB through 512GB, with plans for a 1TB device in 2025. As we look to the future, vehicles will continue to migrate to higher levels of driving automation and it’s expected that overall capacity requirements will continue to increase.
KIOXIA UFS is well-positioned to support increasingly complex automotive applications with its fast interface and performance capabilities, ensuring an excellent user experience. This is critical for the automotive market and its future growth. As vehicles become more sophisticated, KIOXIA UFS will continue to play a pivotal role in meeting the demanding memory needs of the automotive industry. Let’s all buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a product category for a class of embedded memory products built to the JEDEC UFS standard specification. Due to its serial interface, UFS supports full duplexing, which enables both concurrent reading and writing between the host processor and UFS device.
Read and write speed may vary depending on various factors such as host devices, software (drivers, OS etc.), and read/write conditions.
All other company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Definition of capacity: KIOXIA 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 = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 2^40 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.