Kioxia Corporation, a world leader in memory solutions, today announced sampling of its newest generation of 256 and 512 gigabyte (GB) Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices. Housed in 0.8 and 1.0mm-high packages, the new products improve performance by approximately 30% for random read and approximately 40% for random write[1] – making them thinner[2] and faster than their predecessors. Kioxia's new UFS devices utilize the company's high-performance fifth-generation BiCS FLASH™ 3D flash memory and are targeted to a variety of mobile applications including leading-edge smartphones.

The broad set of power and space conscious applications that utilize embedded flash memory continue to need higher performance and density, and UFS has increasingly been the solution of choice. From a total GB perspective, UFS now accounts for the majority of the demand relative to e-MMC. According to Forward Insights[3], when combining overall UFS and e-MMC GB demand worldwide, almost 70% of the demand this year is for UFS, and this will continue to grow.

The new UFS 256GB and 512GB devices include the following advances:

Performance increase of approximately 30% for random read and approximately 40% for random write.
Host Performance Booster (HPB) Ver. 2.0: Improves random read performance by utilizing the host side memory to store logical to physical translation tables. While HPB Ver. 1.0 only enables 4KB chunk size access, HPB Ver. 2.0 enables wider access - which can further boost random read performance.
Thinner 256GB package at just 0.8mm height.

Notes
[1] Compared to Kioxia's prior generation of 256/512GB UFS.
[2] In the case of 256GB density compared to Kioxia's prior generation 256GB UFS.
[3] Forward Insights "NAND Quarterly Insights" 2Q (2021)

Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size.