JEDEC Advances Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Removable Card Standard 3.0

[btarunr]

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:

• 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.

Examples of potential use cases include:

• 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

"JEDEC's new UFS card standard offers the same high-end functionality as the highly popular UFS embedded device standard, in a convenient card format that's well suited for a variety of removable applications," said Mian Quddus, Chairman of the JEDEC Board of Directors and the JC-64 Committee for Embedded Memory Storage and Removable Memory Cards. He added, "Supporting multiple, simultaneous data-intensive functions on a smartphone, or for use as an easily extendable storage solution within the automotive market, are just two examples of the versatility of UFS Card 3.0."

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Rei]

Either I missed it or I have yet to see these cards in consumer market & now they come with another version?

What is the IOPS of these cards in random reads/writes anyway?

 

[ArdWar]

Either I missed it or I have yet to see these cards in consumer market & now they come with another version?

Not exactly "consumer" but it is gaining adoption as smartphone internal storage (as eUFS), displacing eMMC.

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.

 

[Rei]

Not exactly "consumer" but it is gaining adoption as smartphone internal storage (as eUFS), displacing eMMC.

That I know. But I & this thread is specifically talking about the card version, not the embedded version. eUFS has already been implemented in smartphones since 2015 with Samsung Galaxy S6 being the first, despite the UFS standard itself already being around since 2011. Seems like the card version just started to come out this year, yet i have seen widespread adoption of it yet.

 

[silentbogo]

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

The reason eUFS is even in the works, is because MicroSD is not 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.

Either I missed it or I have yet to see these cards in consumer market & now they come with another version?

Samsung did UFS2.0 cards, but they are wa-a-a-y too expensive for mass market.

 

[Xajel]

I think PCIe is the future, but it seems having an NVMe in mobile devices is challenging or at least more expensive. It's rare to see even a flagship smartphone with NVMe, If I'm not mistaken then only iphones have this. Most Android flagship went for the UFS route.

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.

 

[Chaitanya]

The reason eUFS is even in the works, is because MicroSD is not 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.

SD(full sized) might be on their way out as camera makers aren't too keen to implement UHS-III let alone SD-express. Also with advent of CF-express Type A cards and Sony adopting this new standards in coming years we might SD die out in favour of NVME based CF-express