Samsung this week said that it has begun mass production of its UFS 3.0 chips. The company’s initial lineup of UFS 3.0 products includes embedded drives featuring a 128 GB and a 512 GB capacity. The company plans to introduce 256 GB and 1 TB versions of its UFS 3.0 devices sometimes in the second half of this year, and we have already seen that the 512 GB edition will appear in the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Perhaps it is a shame that the chip is only just entering mass production, and missed the window for the Samsung Galaxy S10 family.

Samsung’s UFS 3.0 storage drives use the company’s 5th generation 96-layer V-NAND memory as well as a proprietary controller supporting a UFS 3.0 HS Gear 4 two-lane interface. The 512 GB version uses eight 64 GB 96L V-NAND devices, whereas the 128 GB flavor uses two of them.

When it comes to performance, Samsung says that its 512 GB UFS 3.0 embedded flash drive features a sequential read speed of up to 2100 MB/s, a sequential write speed up to 410 MB/s, and 68,000/63,000 read/write IOPS. When compared to SATA SSDs, the 512 GB UFS 3.0 device offers four times higher sequential reads, but is slightly slower as far as write and random performance numbers are concerned.

Samsung's UFS 3.0 Storage ICs
  128 GB 256 GB 512 GB 1 TB
SKUs ? ? ? ?
NAND Type 96-Layer TLC V-NAND
Controller Developed in-house
Interface UFS 3.0
two full-duplex HS-Gear3 lanes
11.6 GT/s per lane
up to 2900 MB/s
Sequential Read Speed ? ? up to 2100 MB/s ?
Sequential Write Speed ? ? Up to 410 MB/s ?
Operating Temperatures ?
Health Status Monitor ?
Data Retention ?
Thermal Sensor ?
Voltage Memory ?
Interface 1.2 V for VCCQ, 1.8 V for VCCQ2
Package Type FBGA-153 (?)
Width 11.5 mm (?)
Length 13 mm (?)
Height 1 mm (?)
Availability February 2019 2H 2019 February 2019 2H 2019

Samsung says that its 128 GB and 512 GB UFS 3.0 embedded drives that launch today are aimed at mobile devices. The company’s own Galaxy S10 smartphones seem to use UFS 2.1 drives, whereas it looks like UFS 3.0 will debut in the Galaxy Fold.

Related Reading

Source: Samsung

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  • HStewart - Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - link

    Sounds like the chip will also be available in Samsung Galaxy Note 10 also - which is later on in year.
  • spaceship9876 - Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - link

    the galaxy s10 5G too.
  • Gemuk - Thursday, February 28, 2019 - link

    Unlikely since the 5G version is 256GB, which is in H2. S10 5G will launch this April.
  • ksec - Thursday, February 28, 2019 - link

    Much more interested in the 128GB Performance, which is where the majority of the sales and performance user will experience.

    And incase any body still cries about the price of Smartphone, All major flagship Smartphones this year would have performance better than majority of Laptop that were shipping 5 years ago, from CPU, GPU to IO, in a package many times smaller.
  • close - Thursday, February 28, 2019 - link

    "which is where the majority of the sales"

    Yes, the speed of the storage has been the main selling point for phones for years now. But not really. Most people look at cameras, screen, number of cores, quantity of RAM and storage. They will always go for quantity and it makes sense, the chances of being limited by storage performance in a high end phone today are slim. Being limited by capacity is a lot more likely.
  • Sivar - Thursday, February 28, 2019 - link

    I believe he was saying that cheaper, lower-capacity phones are the majority of sales, not that the performance of low-capacity storage is a main selling point.

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