“With our introduction of the fastest mobile storage, smartphone users will no longer have to worry about the bottleneck they face with conventional storage cards,” said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “The new eUFS 3.1 reflects our continuing commitment to supporting the rapidly increasing demands from global smartphone makers this year.”

At a sequential write speed of over 1,200MB/s, Samsung 512GB eUFS 3.1 boasts more than twice the speed of a SATA-based PC (540MB/s) and over ten times the speed of a UHS-I microSD card (90MB/s). This means consumers can enjoy the speed of an ultra-slim notebook when storing massive files like 8K videos or several hundred large-size photos in their smartphones, without any buffering. Transferring contents from an old phone to a new device will also require considerably less time. Phones with the new eUFS 3.1 will only take about 1.5 minutes to move 100GB of data whereas UFS 3.0-based phones require more than four minutes.

In terms of random performance, the 512GB eUFS 3.1 processes up to 60 percent faster than the widely used UFS 3.0 version, offering 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for reads and 70,000 IOPS for writes.

Along with the 512GB option, Samsung will also have 256GB and 128GB capacities available for flagship smartphones.

Samsung began volume production of fifth-generation V-NAND at its new Xi’an, China, line (X2) this month to fully accommodate storage demand throughout the flagship and high-end smartphone market. The company soon plans to shift V-NAND volume production at its Pyeongtaek line (P1) in Korea from fifth-generation to sixth-generation V-NAND to better address the growing demand.

Samsung Embedded Storage Memory Lineup

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing its fifth-generation V-NAND memory chips with the fastest data transfers now available. In the industry’s first use of the ‘Toggle DDR 4.0’ interface, the speed for transmitting data between storage and memory over Samsung’s new 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND has reached 1.4-gigabits per second (Gbps), a 40-percent increase from its 64-layer predecessor.

The energy efficiency of Samsung’s new V-NAND remains comparable to that of the 64-layer chip, primarily because the operating voltage has been reduced from 1.8 volts to 1.2 volts. The new V-NAND also has the fastest data write speed to date at 500-microseconds (μs), which represents about a 30-percent improvement over the write speed of the previous generation, while the response time to read-signals has been significantly reduced to 50μs.

Packed inside Samsung’s fifth-generation V-NAND are more than 90 layers of ‘3D charge trap flash (CTF) cells,’ the largest amount in the industry, stacked in a pyramid structure with microscopic channel holes vertically drilled throughout. These channel holes, which are only a few hundred-nanometers (nm)-wide, contain more than 85 billion CTF cells that can store three bits of data each. This state-of-the-art memory fabrication is the result of several breakthroughs that include advanced circuit designs and new process technologies.

Thanks to enhancements in the V-NAND’s atomic layer deposition process, manufacturing productivity has also increased by more than 30 percent. The cutting-edge technique allows the height of each cell layer to be reduced by 20 percent, prevents crosstalk between cells and increases the efficiency of the chip’s data processing.

“Samsung’s fifth-generation V-NAND products and solutions will deliver the most advanced NAND in the rapidly growing premium memory market,” said Kye Hyun Kyung, executive vice president of Flash Product and Technology at Samsung Electronics. “In addition to the leading-edge advances we are announcing today, we are preparing to introduce 1-terabit (Tb) and quad-level cell (QLC) offerings to our V-NAND lineup that will continue to drive momentum for next-generation NAND memory solutions throughout the global market.”

Samsung will be quickly ramping up production of its fifth-generation V-NAND to meet a wide range of market needs, as it continues to lead the high-density memory movement across critical sectors such as supercomputing, enterprise servers and the latest mobile applications such as premium smartphones.