Samsung announced that it has started production of Universal Flash Storage chips, or UFS chips, which would be the first production release of the technology that could offer users with memory for their mobile devices reaching 128 GB.
The company is claiming that the UFS chips can achieve random reading speeds of 14,000 IOPs, which is 28 times faster compared to the external memory cards that the technology is looking to replace.
Samsung added that the UFS chips provide a better experience for users when doing multiple tasks at once on their device, which is a boon for mobile device users. Smartphones and tablets will no longer crash or slow down when the user multitasks, with apps running in the background while watching ultra-high-quality videos for example.
The UFS chips will apply the latest UFS 2.0 interface developed by JEDEC, which is the international standard setter for semiconductor technology. The chips are seen as the next generation of NAND flash products after the embedded multimedia cards, or eMMCs, that are now being used in smartphones and tablets.
Samsung, an international mobile device maker but also the biggest memory chip manufacturer in the world in terms of revenue, revealed that it used a technology called Command Queue in the UFS chips. This is the same technology that is being used in the production of SSDs, or solid-state drives, for the processing of input data and output data at the same time. Command Queue allows UFS chips to read faster than the regular eMMC 5.0 by up to 2.7 times.
The UFS chips will feature memory sizes of 32GB, 64GB and a maximum of 128GB, which are all double compared to the size of eMMCs which come in at 16GB, 32GB and 64GB.
Similar to the embedded Package-on-Package technology that Samsung unveiled earlier in 2015, UFS chips can be stacked on top of processors. This characteristic of UFS chips will allow companies to design, develop and manufacture mobile devices with even thinner bodies.
A spokesperson for Samsung did not issue a comment when asked who Samsung's client is for the UFS chips. However, expectations are that it will be the company itself that will first be using it, possibly for the much-anticipated Galaxy S6 smartphones that will also be using the ePoP technology.
Samsung, however, is not yet ceasing the development of production of eMMCs. In fact, the company has started the mass production of version 5.1 for eMMCs.
