Built to Drive: Kioxia’s Rugged UFS 4.0 Memory Takes Control of Car Tech

Kioxia has heralded a significant advancement in automotive technology by announcing the industry’s first in-car UFS 4.0 embedded flash memory, with sample offerings already underway. The products are available in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB, designed to withstand a broad temperature range, comply with AEC-Q100 Grade2 standards, and offer enhanced reliability for complex automotive applications.

Kioxia’s new offering features a compact package that delivers swift embedded storage transfer speeds, perfect for a range of cutting-edge automotive applications, including in-car remote information processing systems, infotainment systems, and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The automotive UFS products from Kioxia showcase remarkable performance improvements, with sequential read speeds approximately doubling and sequential write speeds increasing by about 40%. This performance enhancement allows related applications to better harness the benefits of 5G connectivity, leading to faster system boot times and an elevated user experience.

The newly unveiled UFS 4.0 device integrates BiCS FLASH 3D memory and a controller within a JEDEC standard package. It employs MIPI M-PHY 5.0 and UniPro2.0 technologies, supporting theoretical interface speeds of up to 23.2 Gbps per lane or 46.4 Gbps per device. Furthermore, Kioxia’s automotive UFS 4.0 is compatible with UFS 3.1.

The product supports a High-Speed Link Start-up Sequence (HS-LSS), enabling faster initiation of the transmission link (M-PHY and UniPro initialization sequences) between the device and host than traditional UFS’s HS-G1 Rate A (1248Mbps). This is expected to reduce link start-up time by approximately 70% compared to conventional methods.