Faster 256GB chip for smartphones unveiled

Samsung Electronics announced Thursday that it has started mass-producing 256-gigabyte embedded memory chips for smartphones, the first company in the world to do so.

The company said the new 256-gigabyte Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is nine times faster than high-performance micro SD cards and nearly twice as fast as SSDs for laptops.

“By providing high-density UFS memory that is nearly twice as fast as SATA SSD for PCs, we will contribute to a paradigm shift in the mobile data storage market,” said Choi Joo-sun, memory sales and marketing executive vice president at Samsung Electronics.

He added that the company will focus on enhancing both performance and capacity in its memory products.

The new chip can handle up to 45,000 and 40,000 input/output operations per second for reading and writing. It has a reading speed of 850 megabytes per second and sequential writing speed of 260 megabytes per second, over two times faster than the previous generation of UFS memory.

The 256-gigabyte UFS memory chip is made with Samsung’s 3D V-NAND flash, and it uses two lanes of data transfer to move data at up to 850 megabytes per second.

Samsung launched the first 128-gigabyte UFS chip early last year, and it has successfully doubled storage and speed in only a year.

Samsung Electronics said the 256-gigabyte memory chip will satisfy demand for high speed, large data capacity and compact size.

The new memory chip will allow smartphone users to enjoy seamless ultra high-definition video streaming, according to the company. Customers won’t have to stare at their screens for a couple of seconds when they search for photos or articles. They can watch videos as search results come up.

The 256-gigabyte UFS chip can also help smartphones support the USB 3.0 interface to store nearly 47 full HD movies. The interface with the chip will allow sending a 5-gigabyte HD video clip in 11 seconds, or 10 times faster than the previous generation, according to the company.

The new UFS memory chips are even smaller than external micro SD cards, the company said.

Samsung Electronics, the No. 1 smartphone maker, recently unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The S7 and S7 Edge do not have the 256-gigabyte chip embedded in them.

BY KIM YOUNG-NAM [kim.youngnam@joongang.co.kr]