Micron delivers world’s fastest UFS 4.0 for flagship smartphones

Today, smartphones are ubiquitous as our personal companions, truth tellers, and sources of news and entertainment. On top of that, they know us — our preferences and habits, and increasingly, our sentiment and routines — and they anticipate our needs to make our lives more efficient and enjoyable. This is also referred as machine learning (ML). 

For example, with personalized data inference, your smartphone can calculate the fastest route home based on traffic, order dinner based on your preferences and caloric intake for the day, and turn on lights and adjust the temperature before you step through the front door. Today, the proliferation of these advanced use cases, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, is the key driver of innovation for the mobile ecosystem.

In lock step with AI software innovation comes next-generation hardware capabilities and form factors for smartphones. Flagship smartphones deliver a superior end user experience, and device manufacturers prioritize feature sets such as multiple cameras, hi-res active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) displays, advanced sensors, powerful processors and ultrafast charging speeds. Form factors such as foldable phones are becoming widely adopted as they allow you to seamlessly and simultaneously multitask across multiple applications and ushers in PC-like features. All at once, you can listen to your favorite playlist on Spotify, play your favorite streaming game with friends from around the globe, and check in with your colleagues to decide where you’ll meet for lunch. These next-generation use cases demand high-bandwidth, low-latency, and massive-capacity embedded memory and storage. This is where Micron’s value is realized — by enabling the world’s leading smartphone manufacturers with best-in-class memory and storage solutions,¹ purpose-built for smartphones.

To deliver on the promise of AI and mobile innovation, we have developed the industry’s best-in-class UFS 4.0 embedded flash storage designed for flagship smartphones. Micron UFS 4.0 headlines our leadership portfolio of innovative flash storage solutions for mobile. Available in capacities of up to 1TB, you can store up to 250,000 HD photos on your smartphone; worrying about running out of space isn’t as pressing now. UFS 4.0 is designed with our latest controller and highly configurable firmware architecture, so our partners have complete confidence in supply and qualifications.

Performance: It’s in the numbers

Micron UFS 4.0 outperforms on critical NAND benchmarks, which are key to delivering the best possible end user experience for flagship smartphones — all underpinned by our advanced 232-layer 3D NAND and our vertically integrated controller and firmware.

With 4300 megabytes per second (MBps) sequential read and 4000 MBps sequential write speed, Micron UFS 4.0 clocks in at twice the performance of previous-generation UFS 3.1. On top of impressive read and write speed improvements, our UFS 4.0 provides a 10% write latency improvement over the competition, which means you will experience much more responsive performance when downloading and launching apps. You can download two hours of 4K streaming content in under 15 seconds, twice as fast as the prior generation.² Think about that the next time you’re about to board a flight; you can download two hours of your favorite streaming content — in less than 15 seconds!

Battery life: Less plug, more play

Being able to quickly download and access your favorite apps, photos and videos on your smartphone is important. However, being able to do so while sustaining the life of your battery throughout the day is critical. In fact, a major complaint for consumers is that they want to be on their phones more and worry about plugging them in less. Micron’s UFS 4.0 is 25% more power-efficient than previous-generation UFS.2 So even when you’re using your favorite high-bandwidth AI apps and scrolling for hours on your favorite social media apps, you’re able to enjoy more time on your smartphone between charges.

Technology innovation: A rich heritage

Our 512GB and 1TB UFS 4.0 embedded storage solutions are designed using our advanced 232-layer 3D NAND with six-plane architecture, allowing significantly higher random read throughput.  This advanced six-plane architecture provides improved responsiveness, and end users will experience faster application load times with an overall more seamless smartphone experience.

Micron UFS 4.0 is also enabled with a custom-built controller, which enhances the synergy between the flash storage components, NAND controller and firmware to ultimately deliver a final product with best-in-class performance.

We have also designed and developed proprietary firmware features to create even more value for our customers. Our UFS 4.0 comes equipped with DSS (data stream separation), which reduces background garbage collection on your device; ARB (automatic read burst), which improves the read performance using device defragmentation; and data eye monitoring, which is a signal integrity tool. We are constantly innovating and creating new firmware features that go beyond the call of industry standards to surprise and delight our customers based on their unique needs.

Customer focus: Delivering best-in-class solutions with differentiated value

Yes, we’re fast, and our solutions enable your smartphone battery life to be more efficient. However, at Micron, we go beyond feeds and speeds.

We develop our flagship memory and storage solutions with a deep understanding of the needs of the mobile ecosystem, analyzing micro- and macrotrends for mobile use cases and extrapolating those findings to predict future use cases and solutions for our customers. In our labs, we investigate the what, when, how and other nuances of end user behavior, and we develop our memory and storage solutions to go beyond the call of standard specifications.

AI innovation for mobile use cases is gaining momentum and creating novel applications, some we are already experiencing in our smartphones. The neural networks inside of our smartphones are constantly on, collecting, analyzing and learning from our patterns and delivering rich end user experiences.  End users will experience the benefits of AI through outputs such as natural language translation and modeling, computational photography and video, and collecting contextual data to serve us up personalized recommendations.

There is a lot happening behind the scenes, when feeding the AI engines in your smartphone, processing the massive flow of data on the edge to garner insights and foster predictions. High-bandwidth, low-latency, and low-power memory in addition to super-fast and high-capacity embedded flash storage is critical for these actions to take place on your smartphone. With this combination of embedded memory and storage in your smartphone, AI engines can keep up with the constant flow of data and enable future use cases, and you’ll see the benefits when using your smartphone.

Micron UFS 4.0 is perfectly positioned to help innovate the next wave of these 5G and AI-enabled apps and user experiences for mobile. Our UFS 4.0 storage solution is now shipping to key mobile manufacturers and chipset vendors and will begin high-volume production in the second half of the year. Learn more about Micron UFS in this infographic and our UFS page.  

¹ As compared to benchmark testing in Micron labs against competitors’ publicly available UFS 4.0 product performance  
² As compared to previous-generation UFS 3.1 176-layer NAND