Speed increase requirements keep on flowing by in all the domains surrounding us. The same applies to memory storage too. Earlier mobile devices used eMMC based flash storage, which was a significantly slower technology. With increased SoC processing speed, pairing it with slow eMMC storage was becoming a bottleneck. That is when modern storage technology Universal Flash Storage (UFS) started to gain popularity.
UFS is a simple and high-performance mass storage device with a serial interface. It is primarily used in mobile systems between host processing and mass storage memory devices. Another important reason for the usage of UFS in mobile systems like smartphones and tablets is minimum power consumption.
To achieve the highest performance and most power-efficient data transport, JEDEC UFS works in collaboration with industry-leading specifications from the MIPI® Alliance to form its Interconnect Layer. MIPI UniPro is used as a transport layer, and MIPI MPHY is used as a physical layer with the serial DpDn interface.
UFS 4.0 specification is the latest specification from JEDEC, which leverages UniPro 2.0 and MPHY 5.0 specification standards to achieve the following major improvements:
- Enables up to 4200 Mbps read/write traffic with MPHY 5.0, allowing 23.29 Gbps data rate.
- High Speed Link Startup, along with Out of Order Data Transfer and BARRIER Command, were introduced to improve system latencies.
- Data security is enhanced with Advanced RPMB. Advance RPMB also uses the EHS field of the header, which reduces the number of commands required compared to normal RPMB, increasing the bandwidth.
- Enhanced Device Error History was introduced to ease system integration.
- File Based Optimization (FBO) was introduced for performance enhancement.
Along with many major enhancements, UFS 4.0 also maintains backward compatibility with UFS 3.0 and UFS 3.1.
JEDEC has just announced the UFS 4.0 specification release, quoting Cadence support as a constant contributor in the JEDEC UFS Task Group, actively participating in these specifications development.
With the availability of the Cadence Verification IP for JEDEC UFS 4.0, MIPI MPHY 5.0 and MIPI UniPro 2.0, early adopters can start working with the provisional specification immediately, ensuring compliance with the standard and achieving the fastest path to IP and SoC verification closure.
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Yeshavanth B N