Samsung begins mass production of 256 GB eUFS solutions for the automotive market
Back in early December of last year, Samsung revealed that the mass production of its first 512 GB eUFS storage solution for mobile devices had begun. That happened one year after the introduction of the first 256 GB eUFS storage solution (obviously, by Samsung as well). Now, the time has come for a new "industry's first" by Samsung: the first 256 GB eUFS 2.1 solution for automotive applications that features advanced features of the UFS 3.0 standard.
According to the official press release, this new memory solution arrives only a few months after the industry's first 128 GB eUFS for the automotive industry, which has been introduced last September. The 256 GB eUFS solution is already being shipped to automotive manufacturers that will use it for advanced driver assistance systems, next-gen infotainment, as well as luxury vehicles' high-end dashboards.
The Samsung 256 GB eUFS for automotive can handle temperatures between -40° C and 105° C in both operating and power-saving modes. The conventional eMMC 5.1 solutions used so far are usually guaranteed to work from -25° C to 85° C in operating mode, and can handle temperatures from -40° C to 85° C while in idle or power-saving mode.
This innovative memory solution can provide a sequential read speed of 850 MB/s and up to 45,000 IOPS random reads. The two UFS 3.0 features present are temperature notification (a Samsung proprietary technology) and data refresh. The first one notifies the host application processor when the device temperature goes above a certain level, while the second enables increased reliability by automatically relocating older data to less-used cells.
Since this is a product clearly aimed at an enterprise sector of the market, we cannot expect to see it anytime soon in mobile phones or other portables. On the other hand, the UFS 3.0 specifications will surely bring improvements to the mobile world sooner or later.