Yuping Chung Mobile Storage Product Manager
JEDEC, the industry standard body defining both eMMC and UFS interfaces, is busy working on defining the next generation eMMC and UFS to operate faster than the current UFS 3 Gbps. Last week I attended the quarterly session. It is expected that the industry will see new faster eMMC or UFS announcements in 2013. I can share some of the pubic highlights with you. Samsung recently introduced ~260MB/s read and ~50MB/write eMMC class 2000. This is a very interesting development as current eMMC V4.51 only supports up to 200MB/s. Clearly, Samsung is leading the industry to satisfy the ever demanding mobile consumers who expects instantaneous responses from their tablets or smartphone. This Samsung announcement also helped pushing the industry standard body to accelerate their standard definition for future eMMC or other mobile storage standards.One of the mobile storage standards is UFS (Universal Flash Storage) which is capable of running up to 3 Gbps (or 300MB/s). Given that Samsung’s eMMC is able to run up to 260MB/s, it puts pressure and competes against UFS head to head. This will definitely accelerate UFS, which use MIPI’s M-PHY as the physical layer interconnect, to move into its next performance grade identified to be ~6 Gbps. UFSA will be at the Storage Visions Conference in Las Vegas, Jan 7-8, Booth #48.
