Toshiba Corporation issued a press release today announcing the commencement of the first sample shipments of NAND chips using the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver.1.1 standard interface. The new 64GB UFS chip modules, intended to be used in a “wide range of digital consumer products” offer transfer speeds up to 50 per cent faster than existing eMMC interfaced devices.
Current eMMC (embedded MultiMediaCard) standard NAND chips support transfer speeds of up to 200MB per second. The UFS interface on Toshiba’s new 64GB NAND modules currently support transfer speeds of up to 300MB per second and is scalable to 600MB per second.
These first shipments will be tested in designs for new and upcoming devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs so are not likely to be available in consumer devices very soon. Full scale manufacturing depends upon demand from the companies testing these samples, as the press release says “Toshiba will schedule mass-production and other densities in its line-up according to market demand.” PCAdvisor quotes Toshiba spokesman Atsushi Ido as saying “We will build up to mass production to meet demand.”
The JEDEC microelectronics industry standards body is promoting the UFS standard as a faster, less power hungry successor to eMMC standard. That sounds good for the performance of battery powered mobile devices.
Other large semiconductor and mobile companies supporting the UFS standard include Samsung, Qualcomm and Nokia. In time it is expected that removable UFS storage will challenge the popular SD card standard.
