Samsung today announced that it has started mass production of the industry's first 256GB embedded universal flash storage for advanced in-car solutions. The company says that the new 256GB eUFS 2.1 for cars is the first storage device on the market to incorporate the advanced features of the recently announced UFS 3.0 standard.
This new storage solution is the successor to Samsung's 128GB eUFS chips that the company started producing four months ago. Samsung is now shipping its 256GB eUFS to car manufacturers for advanced in-car solutions such as next-gen infotainment systems, new-age dashboards in luxury cars and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.
New 256GB eUFS gets thermal management features from UFS 3.0
Much like its predecessor, the 256GB eUFS promises sequential reads of 850 megabytes per second (MB/s), that's the high end of the existing JEDEC UFS 2.1 standard, with random read operations at 45,000 IOPS. It also has a data refresh feature to speed up processing and ensures improved system reliability by relocating older data to other less-used cells.
To be clear, the 256GB eUFS is not entirely based on the new UFS 3.0 standard which doubles the maximum peak data transfer rate of the existing UFS 2.1 standard. The new storage solution simply features new thermal management capabilities that are a part of the UFS 3.0 standard.
Thermal management is very important for automotive memory applications. Samsung's 256GB eUFS has an extended temperature range between -40°C and 105°C for both operational and power-saving modes.
Even though memory storage has a heat-sensitive nature, Samsung's new solution easily endures the temperature specification and even has a temperature notification feature built by the company to notify the host application processor when the device temperature exceeds 105°C or other preset levels. This would signal the AP to regulate its clock speed to bring down the temperature to an acceptable level.
“With the new temperature threshold for automobile warranties, major automotive manufacturers can now design-in memory that’s even well suited for extreme environments and know they will be getting highly reliable performance,” said Kyoung Hwan Han, vice president of NAND marketing at Samsung Electronics.
The company is now supplying this new memory solution to car makers and we expect it to come out with memory solutions based entirely on the new UFS 3.0 standard in the not too distant future.
