Smartphones and portable devices in general are becoming more and more powerful and it has therefore become necessary to combine the SoC with storage units at the height. The well-known manufacturer Kioxia recently announced its next generation of devices UFS (Universal Flash Storage) than using the M-PHY 5.0 protocol Of MIPI for the physical level, offering much higher performance than in the past, so much so as to be comparable to those of PCI Express 4.0 SSD entry-level.
These new devices, which we will find in the future on smartphones, tablets and notebooks, will be available in configurations from 128, 256 And 512GB and will be based on BiCS 3D NAND. Despite relying on the 3.1 protocol, thanks to M-PHY 5.0 they will be able to deliver up to 23.2Gb / s of bandwidth per line or 46.4 Gb / s for two lines in HS-Gear5 mode. This would allow new media to offer one sequential read speeds up to 4.4GB / s (an incredible 90% increase over Kioxia’s top-of-the-line UFS solutions), as well as faster random read and write speedsrespectively, of about 35% and 60%.
However, in reality, as M-PHY 5.0 sticks to an 8b / 10b line encoding, the actual maximum bandwidth should be around 1.85GB / s and 3.75GB / s, respectively, for one or two lines. . In any case, these are speeds comparable to a PCIe 4.0 x2 SSD, a great leap compared to the past.
Kioxia will begin shipping samples of its new 256GB UFS devices on February 25th, continuing with the others at a later date. Precisely for this reason, as well as for the development of SoCs able to exploit M-PHY 5.0, it will be necessary to wait until next year before seeing smartphones and other devices equipped with these modules.
