Micron announced the first shipments of its UFS 4.0 chips, the most advanced standard for internal storage of smartphones and other mobile devices such as tablets, cameras, wearables, drones or portable consoles.

You already know that compared to SSDs, which are widely used in personal computers, mobile devices use different types of chips for internal storage. The standard is called Universal flash storage and the latest version of UFS 4.0 started to be deployed this year by Samsung or Kioxia, which were announced at the last Computex.

Now comes solutions from another of the giants, Micron, which, like the others, promises performance boosts to move with warranties tasks that require a large amount of data processing on mobile devices such as high-definition photos and videos, mobile games, 5G devices or applications that will arrive with next-generation AR and VR headsets.

Micron UFS 4.0 is based on the manufacturer’s 232-layer 3D NAND memories and can scale to capacities up to 1 TByte. The manufacturer also claims that his “highly configurable firmware” combined with various technological improvements “will deliver unmatched performance for flagship smartphones”.

Micron explains that it used a new six-level NAND architecture (higher layer of stacked arrays of memory cells) to increase random read performance, a critical specification for increased overall responsiveness and faster loading. This architecture will be available in higher 512GB and 1Tbyte versions, as the 256GB configuration will still use quad NAND.

The manufacturer promises data transfer speed 4,300 Mbytes per second sequential read and 4,000 Mbytes per second write. These are values ​​higher than those achieved by SSDs connected to PCIe Gen3, very important to meet the greater performance needs of modern mobile applications and in other devices where they are used, of which there are quite a few, be it cameras, portable consoles. or VR. /ar.

Microsoft’s new memory promises a 25% improvement in energy efficiency, ensuring devices don’t drain the battery faster due to improved performance. Micron promises to start mass production of its new UFS 4.0 storage chips in the second half of 2023 and ship them to manufacturers in three storage configurations: 256GB, 512GB and 1TB.