Toshiba Corp. has announced that it had started sample shipments of a 64GB embedded NAND flash memory module equipped with a UFS inteface. The module is fully compliant with the JEDEC UFS ver.1.1 standard and is designed for application in a wide range of digital consumer products, including smartphones, tablet PCs.

Toshiba’s 64GB NAND flash memory chip comes with 169-ball packaging and boasts with ultra-speedy 2.9Gb/s interface. Samples are mainly intended for evaluation of UFS I/F and its protocol in host chipsets and by OS vendors. At present, it is unclear when Toshiba expects to start mass production of UFS-compliant memory.

To achieve the highest performance and most power efficient data transport, JEDEC UFS aligns with industry–leading specifications from the MIPI Alliance to form its interconnect layer. This collaboration continues with UFS v1.1, which supports the M-PHYTM and UniProSM specifications. Recently published, the newest UniPro specification defines a universal chip-to-chip data transport protocol, providing a common tunnel for higher-level protocols. The updated M-PHY interface is designed as the primary physical interface (PHY layer) for the UniPro specification, and is a high speed serial interface. The next generation M-PHY reaches 2.9Gb/s per lane with up-scalability to 5.8Gb/s per lane.

The JEDEC UFS ver.1.1 compliant interface handles essential functions, including writing block management, error correction and driver software. UFS v1.1 implements functionality that are compatible with eMMC v4.51 command protocol improvements such as Context ID (grouping different memory transactions under a single ID so the device can understand that they are related), and Data Tag (tagging specific write transactions so they can be prioritized and targeted to a memory region with higher performance and better reliability).

Tags: Toshiba, UFS, JEDEC, NAND, Flash