According to a new report from DigiTimes, android smartphone manufacturers are slowing down orders for UFS chips (universal flash storage) for their high end flagship offerings.

The reason for holding back on their demands is due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The report states various reasons like fall in consumer spending on non essential goods, along with an overall decline of the smartphone market. Industry sources claimed that the demand for UFS chips is not expected to pick up at least until the final quarter of 2020. This period is when OEMs will wor on launching their next iteration of flagship handsets for 2021.

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Back in July, a steep decline was observed in the Chinese 5G smartphone market. This was followed by a decrease in demand for UFS chips from vendors. In China, shipments dropped by 20.5 percent year on year falling to only 13.91 million units being shipped in July. Although, 5G smartphones accounted for 44.2 of the total sales since January.

During this period, only a total of nine 5G handsets were launched in China, which was all available for less than 2,000 Yuan (roughly 292 US Dollars) and targeted the mid to budget segments in the market. As an alternative to UFS chips, the Chinese market is now opting for eMMC chips for their mid range smartphones. Although, high end premium flagship from OEMs like Samsung, Xiaomi, others would still feature the UFS chips.

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Phones come with either eMMC storage or UFS (Universal Flash Storage) and it is no news that the latter is the faster type of storage. UFS used to be found mostly on flagship phones but in recent times, they have been put into mid-range devices too while eMMC storage has been relegated to entry-level devices.

The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has now unveiled the latest version of UFS called UFS 3.1 (JESD220E). It succeeds UFS 3.0 which appeared in Samsung’s 2019 flagships and even OnePlus’s own phones too.

According to the press release by JEDEC, UFS 3.1 is designed for mobile applications and computing systems that require high-performance with low power consumption. The new storage technology brings three major improvements over the last generation. They are:

• Write Booster: an SLC non-volatile cache that amplifies write speed.
• DeepSleep: a new UFS device low power state targeting lower-cost systems that share UFS voltage regulators with other functions.
• Performance Throttling Notification: allows the UFS device to notify the host when storage performance is throttled due to high temperature.

JEDEC also announced a companion standard called UFS Host Performance Booster (HPB) Extension which provides the option to cache the UFS device logical-to-physical address map in the system’s DRAM.

There is no information regarding when we will begin to see the new storage standard in devices but we will not be surprised if it shows up first in a Samsung device.

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(Source, Via)

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