SK Hynix Launches 780MB/s In-House UFS 2.0 Storage Solution

SK Hynix has mostly been in the news lately thanks to HBM memory, but we shouldn’t forget that they make a lot of other memory based products and one of them is eMMC storage for mobile IT gadgets. They’ve just announced that they have developed the next stage in this with their in-house UFS 2.0 64GB solution based on their own 16nm NAND flash and in-house firmware and controller. The new UFS 2.0 represents a big leap in performance by enabling High-Speed Gear 3 interface with dual data lanes.

UFS is the next generation of embedded flash memory to eMMC for mobile gadgets, it doesn’t just deliver a big boost in read and write performance, it’s also more power efficient. SK Hynix UFS 2.0 performs up to 780MB/s at sequential reads and 160MB/s at writes. The random read and write performance is rated to 32K and 17K IOPS. That is three times the read speed of eMMC 5.1

The UFS 2.0 solution features a lot of things we know from our normal SSDs such as command queuing to handle read and write command simultaneously and achieve a better efficiency by preventing the buffering load in multi-tasking.

UFS is forecast for installation in high-end smartphones from this year and gradually move on to mid-level devices. According to IHS Technology, the share of UFS in mobile embedded memory will take 4% in this year and grow up to 23% in 2017 and 49% in 2019.