Kioxia released a new generation of UFS flash memory: Supports MIPI M-PHY 5.0
Kioxia announced that they have released samples of a new generation of UFS embedded flash memory, the industry’s first UFS flash memory that supports the MIPI M-PHY 5.0 physical layer interface. The data transfer rate is significantly improved, and it can provide entry-level PCI-E 4.0 SSD performance for smartphones, tablets, and thin and light notebooks.
Kioxia’s new UFS flash memory offers three capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB, using their own BiCS 3D flash memory.
These UFS will continue to use the UFS 3.1 but with the new M-PHY 5.0 physical layer, it has a theoretical interface speed of up to 23.2Gbps per lane (x2 lanes = 46.4Gpbs) in HS-GEAR5 mode.
Compared with the previous generation device, the continuous reading and writing speed of 256GB UFS has increased by 90% and 70% respectively, and the continuous reading speed has reached 4.4GB/s. In terms of random performance, random reads are improved by 35%, while random writes are improved by 60%.
The MIPI M-PHY 5.0 still uses the 8b/10b encoding mode. In fact, the interface bandwidth should only be 1.875GB/s for single channel and 3.75GB/s for a dual channel. It can be seen that the bandwidth of the new dual-channel UFS is definitely faster than the existing PCI-E 3.0 x4 SSD, and the performance is basically equal to the PCI-E 4.0 x2 SSD. At present, there is no SoC that supports UFS 3.1 and uses the MIPI M-PHY 5.0.
Kioxia said that “sample shipments of the 256GB device will start from February 25, with the rest of the line-up to gradually follow beginning in August. Specifications of the samples may differ from commercial products.”
