Samsung has developed the industry's highest performing Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 4.0 storage solution, which doubles the speed of the UFS 3.1 chips used today.
Already approved by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, Samsung's UFS 4.0 chips implement the JEDEC standard while also promising to deliver a huge leap in performance. Compared to UFS 3.1, the speed is doubled to 23.2Gbps per lane.
By combining Samsung's 7th-generation V-NAND chips and a proprietary controller, we should expect to see smartphones and tablets boasting read speeds of 4,200MB/s, and write speeds of 2,800MB/s. At the same time, power use is reduced by 46% and achieves 6MB/s per mA, which means faster storage that's also less of a drain on batteries. If that's not impressive enough, Samsung plans to offer up to 1TB of storage in a chip that measures just 11-by-13-by-1mm.
Samsung sees its new UFS 4.0 chips making their way into augmented reality and virtual reality devices, as well as the automotive sector, but smartphones seem likely to be the first to take advantage of the faster storage. Mass production is scheduled for the third quarter of this year, so we should see the chips used in early 2023 devices, assuming supply chains are functioning at somewhere near normal levels by then.