Choosing a mobile-storage interface: eMMC or UFS

Hezi Saar, Synopsys
EDN (July 14, 2016)

It is easy to forget just how rapidly the mobile landscape has evolved. Consider that just twelve short years ago, the Motorola Razr was released. With a 0.3-megapixel camera, a 176×220 screen, and five megabytes of embedded storage, this sleek feature phone was a global sensation, with 110 million devices sold worldwide.

Fast forward to the present day, and it is an entirely different landscape. Smartphones now boast up to 41-megapixel cameras. Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) screens sport resolutions of 2160×3840 pixels, and storage capacities run into the hundreds of gigabytes.

There has been a paradigm shift in how we consume digital information, with a convergence of technologies making mobile our primary compute platform.

From computer-aided design and 4K video editing to console-level gaming, users now expect their mobile devices to handle the most complex of tasks, as if they were sitting in front of an enterprise-grade workstation.

The demands being placed on mobile devices have presented something of a challenge for storage OEMs. As operating systems, applications and user expectations grow in complexity, data transfer bandwidth is being stretched to the breaking point. A range of new standards are now beginning to hit the market, which pave the way for the next generation of high-performance mobile storage.

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