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Have you ever really stopped to think about how truly amazing your smartphone is? From our handheld devices, we can plan dinner out with friends, hail a ride to the restaurant, watch videos or play online games while en route, and capture and share photos from the meal. A host of technologies goes into making these activities possible. In this blog post, we¡¯ll shine the spotlight on Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 4.0, the latest version of the standard that is considered the flash storage for our 5G era.

UFS is a JEDEC-defined standard for flash storage. It delivers higher data transfer speeds, lower power, and increased reliability compared to the legacy embedded multimedia card (eMMC) flash storage standard. Thanks to the UFS standard, we can store vacations worth of high-resolution photos on our phones or call up large video files from our tablets with a few taps.

The performance advantage of UFS is enabled, in part, by its ability to perform simultaneous reads and writes due to its full-duplex interface. By contrast, eMMC is only able to read and write as separate, asynchronous tasks due to its legacy parallel or half-duplex interface. UFS also enables two lanes of data transfer for devices using UFS 2.0 and beyond. The result is that while eMMC data transfer speeds may achieve 400MBps, the UFS 4.0 specification enables data transfer rates up to 5800 MBps. With this type of performance, UFS is becoming the preferred storage option in the 5G mobile world.

When JEDEC announced the UFS 4.0 specification in 2022, the 5G world gained speeds of up to 2900 MBps per lane, double the rate of the preceding UFS 3.1 solution. In this world, fast and secure connectivity and storage are important. Specific to security, data encryption and Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) are included in UFS devices as a means to protect data confidentiality and prevent replay attacks through eavesdropping.

Designing for the latest standard does come with some challenges. Read on to learn how you can optimize your implementation of UFS 4.0-based designs with proven IP.

How Does UFS 4.0 Enhance Mobile Devices?

Let¡¯s take a look at how some key applications for UFS 4.0 benefit from the standard:

• Smartphones and tablets can tap into high-speed reads and writes for large data files, which translates into faster recording of high-frame-rate videos and faster load times for online games. Low power and security advantages are beneficial as well, in preserving battery life and protecting user data, respectively.
• Automotive applications can also take advantage of fast data transfer speeds, for video as well as for diagnostic applications to support functional safety requirements. Reliability and security are important here, too.
• Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) benefit from the high speeds as well as low latency and low power for more seamless, longer lasting immersive experiences.
• Smart TVs benefit from high-speed reads/writes for video and gaming, as well as the capacity to store operating system and application data.

Synopsys has been a key contributor to the JEDEC specification and continues to provide the industry¡¯s first verification solutions including Synopsys Verification IP and Test suites for UFS. Synopsys Verification IP for UFS provides a comprehensive set of protocol, methodology, verification, and productivity features, enabling users to achieve rapid verification of UFS links operating in high speed and low speed modes.

Running realistic system-level payloads on UFS designs require a faster hardware-based pre-silicon solution. Synopsys Virtual System Adaptors and Transactors based on Synopsys IP enable fast verification hardware solutions including Synopsys ZeBu? emulation systems and Synopsys HAPS? prototyping systems for validation use cases. Synopsys protocol verification solutions are natively integrated with the Synopsys Verification Family of products including Synopsys Verdi? debugger and regression management and automation with Synopsys VC Execution Manager.