Tuesday, December 8th 2020
JEDEC Advances Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Removable Card Standard 3.0
JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the worldwide leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of JESD220-2B Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Card Extension Standard 3.0. This new version of the removable memory card standard defines functionality closely aligned with the popular UFS 3.0 embedded device standard already widely recognized in many high-end mobile and consumer-focused applications. JESD220-2B is now available for download from the JEDEC website.
UFS is a prominent high-performance interface designed for use in applications where power consumption needs to be minimized, including mobile systems such as smartphones and tablets as well as for automotive and IOT applications. Its high-speed serial interface and optimized protocol enable major improvements in throughput and system performance.
The JESD220-2B UFS 3.0 card standard provides a standardized platform for leading-edge removable storage. It offers the following substantial improvements over the prior version of the Flash memory standard, including:
UFS is a prominent high-performance interface designed for use in applications where power consumption needs to be minimized, including mobile systems such as smartphones and tablets as well as for automotive and IOT applications. Its high-speed serial interface and optimized protocol enable major improvements in throughput and system performance.
- Performance: JESD220-2B doubles the maximum interface performance to 1.2 Gigabytes per second (GB/s) from a maximum of 600 Megabytes per second (MB/s) for the prior version.
- Boot Support: UFS Card 3.0 now offers boot support, allowing products to boot more quickly and easily through the use of a UFS Card.
- Interoperability: To improve interoperability and sharply reduce development complexities, JESD220-2B simplifies selected features, including the removal of features not needed for the removable card such as Product State Awareness (PSA), Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB), Context, Priority of Logical Unit, and Dynamic Capacity. UFS Card 3.0 also minimizes the number of Logical Units to simplify storage management.
- Data-intensive smartphone applications
- Recording data from multiple, hi-resolution video cameras simultaneously (high-end drones, automotive applications)
- Storage for automotive applications such as infotainment, ADAS, navigation, and black box recordings
6 Comments on JEDEC Advances Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Removable Card Standard 3.0
What is the IOPS of these cards in random reads/writes anyway?
As for actual removable consumer UFS device, I guess adoption inertia is one hell of a hurdle. For the most part MicroSD is still capable enough.
SD interface itself is just a fancy QSPI pushed to its limits, and at this point you can't really push it any further without changing things, hence SD class specification ends at 90MB/s (for a 100MB/s theoretical cap), and why new UHS cards have use additional differential bus to even saturate eMMC bandwidth. Samsung's UFS2.0 cards are essentially a transitional variant, which looks and works similarly to UHS-II/III, only with SD interface removed. UFS3 cards probably won't make much of an impact either, but they'll bring us a lot closer to finally modernizing portable media storage, which became a real mess over the years.
The main driving point today is 4K. And the spectrum of applications is much larger than just "phones". Video Cameras and DSLRs still have no alternatives other than full-blown SSDs. Security devices, data loggers, dashcams, etc.etc.etc.Samsung did UFS2.0 cards, but they are wa-a-a-y too expensive for mass market.
But, seeing this now, and the fact that I couldn't see any single demo for it while microSD Express has been demoed already back in Computex 2019 with Western Digital showing of their demo SanDisk microSD Express compared to the regular flagship microSD Extreme, it's very promising and faster in all tests. And also, the SD Association already announced the SD Express 8.0 spec. back in May 2020 (the demo was on SD Express 7.1).
microSD Express will support a maximum of a single lane of PCIe 3.0 or 4.0, while the full size SD Express can support either 1 or 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0 or 4.0, speeds can reach up to 1 or 2 GB/s for microSD Express and 1, 2 or 4GB/s on SD Express. That's not to mention the much higher IO performance of PCIe storage. I mean just look at the Computex 2019 demo.