Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a common flash storage specification for digital cameras, mobile phones and consumer electronic devices. It aims to bring higher data transfer speed and increased reliability to flash memory storage, while reducing market confusion and removing the need for different adapters for different types of card.
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Overview
The proposed specification is supported by leading firms in the consumer electronics industry such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics, Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix. UFS is positioned as a replacement for eMMCs and SD cards. The electrical interface for UFS uses the M-PHY, developed by the MIPI Alliance, a high speed serial interface targeting 2.9 Gbit/s per lane with up-scalability to 5.8 Gbit/s per lane. UFS implements a full-duplex serial LVDS interface that scales better to higher bandwidths than the 8-lane parallel interface of eMMCs. Unlike eMMC, Universal Flash Storage is based on the SCSI architectural model and supports SCSI Tagged Command Queuing.
The standard is developed by, and available from, the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association. In September 2013, JEDEC published JESD220B UFS 2.0 (update to UFS v1.1 standard published in June 2012). JESD220B Universal Flash Storage v2.0 offers increased link bandwidth for performance improvement, a security features extension and additional power saving features over the UFS v1.1.
The Linux kernel supports UFS.
UFS cards
March 30, 2016, JEDEC published version 1.0 of the UFS Card Extension Standard.
On July 7, 2016, Samsung introduced the first UFS cards in 32, 64, 128, and 256 GB storage capacities. The cards are based on the UFS 1.0 Card Extension Standard. The 256GB version will offer sequential read performance up to 530 MB/s and sequential write performance up to 170 MB/s and random performance of 40,000 read IOPS and 35,000 write IOPS.
On 17 November 2016 Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835 SoC with support for UFS 2.1, although there are still no official specifications of UFS 2.1. The Snapdragon 835 also supports SD Card Version 3.0 and USB Type-C USB 3.1.