Samsung Electronics made a major breakthrough in the automotive industry in 2017 with the launch of the 128GB embedded Universal Flash Storage. To further their feat, the company has announced today that they have started shipping 256GB eUFS to automotive manufacturers who are currently working on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), next-generation infotainment systems, and new-age dashboards in luxury vehicles.
The Samsung 256GB eUFS, being mass produced at the moment, shall be equipped with advanced features based on automotive specifications from the JEDEC UFS 3.0 standard. One of the primaries focuses of the company in creating this flash storage has been thermal management, and as such, they have extended the temperature range to between -40°C and 105°C for both operational and power-saving modes. This is a major step up from conventional embedded multimedia card (eMMC) 5.1 solutions that provide warranties covering -25°C to 85°C for vehicles in operation and -40°C to 85°C when in the vehicle is in idle or power-saving mode.
With the new temperature threshold for automobile warranties, major automotive manufacturers can now design-in memory that’s even well suited for extreme environments and know they will be getting highly reliable performance. Starting with high-end vehicles, we expect to expand our business portfolio across the entire automotive market, while accelerating growth in the premium memory segment. – Kyoung Hwan Han, Vice President of NAND marketing at Samsung Electronics
Apart from a greater temperature threshold, the Samsung eUFS also features notifications sensors that notify the host application processor (AP) when the device temperature exceeds 105°C or any pre-set level. The AP then regulates its clock speed to lower the temperature accordingly. The speeds for sequential and random read operations for the device are 850 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 45,000 IOPS, respectively, which are at the high end of the current JEDEC UFS 2.1 standard. Furthermore, the device can be sped up using a data refresh feature which speeds up processing and enables greater system reliability by relocating older data to other less-used cells. The aforementioned features form a part of the JEDEC UFS 3.0 standard announced last month.
This latest innovation by Samsung promises to strengthen its technology partnerships with global automakers and component providers, along with helping it become a leader in the premium memory market.
